Ok, so I’ve delayed putting up this post because I don’t like to complain about things, but its just gotten to the point of stupidity. The issue I’m bringing up can be found somewhat in the overworld, but seems to be much, much worse in the personal story quests. What I’m talking about is poor encounter design. Basically every major fight in a game is designed to do something. Good encounters are challenging without being over powering and fun to play. What I continue to see in this game is a total lack of that. I see encounters that are not really challenging but have artificial difficulty injected into them through stupid mechanics.
A prime example of this is the mission ‘Forging the Pact’. In the final fight of that mission against Dzhudin Stormbreak he never got me below about 75% health even though I spent nearly two thirds of the fight stunned. With his MASSIVE number of stuns and absurdly huge amount of health tied to a relatively low damage all in all the encounter wasn’t challenging, just annoying. In other missions I have been chained through knock downs into stuns into daze into another knock down with no chance to do anything. This is not fun and it is a poor way to build encounters.
Any fight I get into when the mobs have enough stun power that I am spending more time watching them then I am actually playing the game is a poorly designed encounter. Many of these encounters need to be reballanced to find a better level of difficulty vs actual fun.
Okay, done whining now, thank you for your time.
My personal opinion is that stuns in any way shape or form are a bad thing when applied to any human player for any reason. Taking away peoples ability to play their toon annoys them.
That storm guy is one of the worst encounters in the story. It’s a total disgrace. Does nothing but spam stun, barely does any damage, and has way too much HP.
My personal opinion is that stuns in any way shape or form are a bad thing when applied to any human player for any reason. Taking away peoples ability to play their toon annoys them.
Yes, this. Stun, knockdown, etc. are mechanics that translate into blocking player input. To a lesser degree it’s also true of effects like immobilize or daze, which block a specific portion of player input. It is telling that in every RPG that has such effects, the big bosses are immune to them. GW2 is no exception with Defiant. Therefore at some level, it seems all game designers acknowledge that this is a very cheese-prone mechanic which is why you have artificial limits on its use against bosses. Why not just do away with them entirely? This type of effect is another one of those RPG tropes that needs to just go away and die.
I recently returned to the game, decided to finally pursue the story a bit more with my highest-level character, and sadly have to agree. That “encounter” was just pure bull. Chain-CC is BAD, period, and it adds insult to injury when the enemy doing it is CC-immune itself. If there’s a “better” way to make a player feel useless and create the very opposite of heroic/epic feeling combat, I can’t think of it. That is one of my general annoyances about “boss fights” in MMOs, and this encounter embodies it “perfectly”.
This is my first post ever and just wanted to say that, this boss is the most useless thing i’ve ever seen in this game.
I know, right?
After the first, say, thirty seconds of the fight I basically am sitting there thinking, "OK, I get it already. Die now. You’re doing no damage, I am not going to lose, and all of this HP you have is just extending this mission artificially." It would have been better, imo, if he had another phase or something.
And I don’t even mind the stun. It’s just that his fight is so completely boring, and the outcome is clear as soon as the abominations are killed.
It’s a shame really, because using control skills against bosses would be a very fun mechanic. It would make a lot of these encounters a lot more interesting. But instead they just render CC useless. Lazy design.
It kind of reminds me of how in Final Fantasy most bosses are usually immune to conditions. It makes the entire magic system redundant, since you might as well just use regular attacks (which when maxed out do far more damage) and spam summons. Which is of course what most players did.
To invent a combat mechanic, and then make all bosses immune to it, is to break one’s own combat system.
ranger, using “rampage as one,” which has a two-minute cd. i was able to pop this four times through the course of this fight, while taking next to no actual damage. his hp is frickin’ nuts, and it’s possibly the most hateful fight in the game. i sit there and literally am like, "um. are you going to die already? we both know how this ends. please. do i HAVE to live through eight minutes of bs, so you can feel like you gave me something “epic”? "
LOL, just a few hours ago i was going throu the same hell whit my guardian, i have very defensive set up whit mace as main weapon(which have slow auto attack), battle practicaly went like this
1 full auto attack chain>2-3 sec stunt>1 full auto attack chain/2# skill symbol(dont remember the name)>2-3 sec stunt>1 full auto attack chain>2-3 sec stunt>…etc.
It was a major pain in the a**, not to meantion that my hp never droped below 90%, hell i was even constantly resing npc to add some more dps so that he will die faster.
The whole mission and the PS in general is pretty bad in terms of encounters.
Just to whine a little:
First you have to watch fifteen minutes of dialogue. No problem, at least the story is progressing.
Second you have to fight your way through a horde of undead to find some friendlies. Well, whatever. At least you can skip past them with skills like Blink and Decoy.
Third you have to defend the friendlies’ whereabouts from a horde of undead that come in like five at a time over a course of ten minutes or so. This is getting annoying.
Fourth you have to fight your way through another horde of undead. This time you can’t skip and run because the useless friendlies are going to die and the mission won’t progress without them.
Fifth: More fighting through hordes of enemies. This time, instead of escaping through the already cleared route, the player has to go to a cul-de-sac, where one more horde spawns and blocks the way to the previously cleared route.
Sixth: After brawling through all the possible trash the friendlies can aggro, there’s the bossfight with a team of knocklocking juggernauts and the storm guy who stuns the player all the time.
Why give the enemies the ability to knock-lock? Why give them stun? Why give them an immense healthpool? The bossfight took me forever because I kept getting pinballed around the area by the lieutenants and stunned by the boss. Plus the friendly NPCs are totally worthless with their nonexistent DPS and low health.
Being overleveled when entering this mission I was very frustrated to have to use multiple minutes to bring down each of the grunts that zerged me all the time. For the casual gamer wanting to just see the story and enjoy the quick mission every now and then there should be an “easymode” or a slightly less aggressive level scaling system. It’s impossible to enjoy the game at my own pace when the game artificially slows me down in the trivial and stale content. Had I been like 4 or 5 levels higher than the grunts I would never have had anything to complain about.
Plus I got stuck inside a rock. Took me ten minutes to successfully Blink my way out of it.
Four months later, Stormbreak is still hands down the most unfun thing in this game. This was absolutely torture to do on a melee character, especially since it takes so long that all the NPCs die and he is exclusively focused on stunning, immobilizing, and dazing you. I think I used Daggerstorm 6 times over the course of trying to kill this obnoxious enemy.
Four months later, Stormbreak is still hands down the most unfun thing in this game. This was absolutely torture to do on a melee character, especially since it takes so long that all the NPCs die and he is exclusively focused on stunning, immobilizing, and dazing you. I think I used Daggerstorm 6 times over the course of trying to kill this obnoxious enemy.
I have done this multiple times (once for myself obvious) on my guardian without any issues. Might be cause my guardian has some very good stunbreaks. But also didnt hadt trouble on my ele, mesmer and engineer.
Point is that the instance itself could have a lot of work involved, specially for the scripting, but the end fight isn’t so bad if you know how to play. Stuns happen, this story is a great way to learn you that and even to find ways to counteract the stuns.
The rest of the story can use a major overhaul.
a: less talking, more action please. all you do at start is running around and having conversations
b: first encounter in the ruins: if you put down a green circle, make the whole area the green circle is covering a place to activate the spawns.
c: Second encounter, let the group on top of the hill actually be helpfull or reduce the difficulty of the spawns.
d: When you in the caves, dont show a circle deep inside where nothing is happening cause 5 miles ago a spawn spawned without warning, objective and when you actually passed it cause some npc was bla-bla-ing.
Arise, ye farmers of all nations
Arise, opressed of Tyria!
My personal opinion is that stuns in any way shape or form are a bad thing when applied to any human player for any reason. Taking away peoples ability to play their toon annoys them.
Yes, this. Stun, knockdown, etc. are mechanics that translate into blocking player input. To a lesser degree it’s also true of effects like immobilize or daze, which block a specific portion of player input. It is telling that in every RPG that has such effects, the big bosses are immune to them. GW2 is no exception with Defiant. Therefore at some level, it seems all game designers acknowledge that this is a very cheese-prone mechanic which is why you have artificial limits on its use against bosses. Why not just do away with them entirely? This type of effect is another one of those RPG tropes that needs to just go away and die.
Agree completely.
Any benefit given to bosses needs to also be given to players in order for the game to be fair. You can’t give a benefit to an inexistance and deny that benefit to an existance simply out of spite and hatred for your players.
Logged in specifically to add my voice to the choir. KD is bad enough as it is with random trash, but that I can get rid off quickly. Why does a boss with a rather handsome amount of HP need a knockdown? Who playtested this and went “oh, that’s some challenging and fun encounter right there, keep it that way!” ?
