Guild Wars 2

[SPOILER WARNING: I couldn’t fit a spoiler warning on the thread title, so consider yourself warned]

So I just ran some people through Arah storymode to help them finish their personal stories. I had read in the patch notes about Zhaitan’s poison bombs being nerfed and the airship battle being nerfed, so I expected that. Here’s what I didn’t see coming:

During phase 1 Zhaitan’s adds are now non-veteran and spawn in ridiculously reduced numbers (2 per spawn instead of 4). They also have next to no HP, so the NPCs killed them before we could even get there. We literally sat on our rears and let the game play itself.

Then it got even better. The three Eyes of Zhaitan during phase 2 had their HP cut in half and their damaged nerfed so hard we took none at all. They died so quick we had over a minute to wait as the ship pulled up next to the tower and we could start the cannon phase. When that started it too less than thirty seconds to kill Zhaitan. Thirty seconds. He didn’t even have time to spawn his tentacle adds you guys put in there to make the phase more “engaging.”

How is this acceptable, Arenanet? How can you justify this second rate game design? This is a FINAL BOSS, something that’s supposed to be difficult to kill. Sure the fight was crap before but at least you had to involve yourself. After the patch this isn’t even a boss fight. It’s comparable to the quicktime event bullcrap that permeates FPS games nowadays. I wouldn’t even call this casual. To call it such would insult the intelligence and skill of casual gamers.

Arenanet you better have some amazing fixes planned for boss fights, especially this one, when you reveal your “phase 2” of the dungeon changes. If this is a sign of things to come then dungeon content in this game is doomed.

I’d hate to be in Arena’s shoes. Half the forum hates the idea of grouping for a personal story quest, the other half wants the dungeon harder.

Does this mean the dungeon is now soloable?

If so then thank god.

Ellisande.5218:

Does this mean the dungeon is now soloable?

If so then thank god.

No, it’s not. Everything up to that point still requires a full group. It only makes the bossfight-turned-quicktime-event that is Zhaitan all the more jarring.

They should have integrated the rest of the dungeons in the storyline, or let the personal story be over after The Source of Orr.

Ruining Arah story mode is the worst of options.

If you’re worried about players having problems, let them have a special buff until they complete it the first time or whatever.

Shimond.2478:

I’d hate to be in Arena’s shoes. Half the forum hates the idea of grouping for a personal story quest, the other half wants the dungeon harder.

Personal story conclusions don’t need to be in a dungeon. That would’ve solved the whole problem.

Keta.9601:

Shimond.2478:

I’d hate to be in Arena’s shoes. Half the forum hates the idea of grouping for a personal story quest, the other half wants the dungeon harder.

Personal story conclusions don’t need to be in a dungeon. That would’ve solved the whole problem.

Amen!

The Source of Orr felt more like a conclusion to the Personal Story for me than Arah too. Dont get me wrong, I wanted to kill Zhaitan but it felt like a different plot. Arah just didnt feel as ‘personal’.

The Source of Orr was my end!
Still have 80 Arah open on all my chars.

Is this because they took out WP rezzing, and so reduced the difficulty so that the party wouldn’t get wiped as easily?

Yeah, I noticed that too. I remember my first time doing it involving lots of deaths and repairing. My party had a few of those, but I don’t think I was good enough to not die a single time during it.

Lonami.2987:

They should have integrated the rest of the dungeons in the storyline, or let the personal story be over after The Source of Orr.

Ruining Arah story mode is the worst of options.

If you’re worried about players having problems, let them have a special buff until they complete it the first time or whatever.

Which is exactly how LotRO handles things. You get a seriously big buff to everything when you start a quest dungeon, and it gets reduced with each party member that joins until it’s removed when the party is full. You can solo the entire main quest, despite it taking you into full-party dungeons.

Still haven’t done Arah on any character despite first getting to it in early September…

It’s beyond easy now, the fights leading up to the final airship (the ground fights) were still about what they were and are ok, but all the airship fights are too soft now imo. I do love the new camera angle on the zhaitan fight, but really that’s about all they did to the final fight that I saw

I just finished my PS and I have to say WTF was that? The fight with the lich in guild wars was a harder fight. Not to mention the BS gift bags. I got NOTHING I could use. Just blues. So I finish the personal story and have better gear than the end game can give me……. Really. I can not describe how disappointed I am in how the game ended.

Lonami.2987:

They should have integrated the rest of the dungeons in the storyline, or let the personal story be over after The Source of Orr.

That wouldn’t make a lick of sense. The entire reason for creating the Pact was to defeat Zhaitan. That was actually the entire purpose for all of your actions for most of the personal story. Trahearne’s Wyld Hunt to cleanse Orr was nothing more than a sidequest which did not invalidate the purpose of the Pact which was destroying Zhaitan. And the Pact’s purpose after cleansing Orr (which should have really had a large effect on nullifying Zhaitan’s power) was still defeating Zhaitan. So your personal story wasn’t even close to over yet, the only thing that was finished was Trahearene’s sidequest.

And that’s also why making the last quest a 5 person quest made no sense whatsoever.

They nerfed Zaitan? Is this a joke? Its been a while since i played that story dungeon but my first time there was kinda cool.. my group and me downed a few times fighting on that ship but… if i could rate it i would rate it easy. Why nerf it?

I only complained about the 10 minutes pressing button 2 on the end, for the rest it was a well balanced story mission.

Leave some challenge left for the gamer plz, dont make stuff too easy.

Personal story conclusions don’t need to be in a dungeon. That would’ve solved the whole problem.

This.

ANET, please listen to your customers requests, and change the Personal Story, so that it’s a PERSONAL STORY, and not a dungeon!

I just got to the ‘you have to get a group of 5 to finish your storyline’ wall and it’s kicked me in the guts. I quite liked the storyline up till then – but why share the end with a bunch of people I don’t know? I will NOT, on principle, start spamming the chat in the zone with ‘LFG arah story’ so I guess it will end up abandoned.

I don’t mind grouping up from time to time, but won’t be forced into it by some game designer’s misguided imperative to ‘encourage social play’.

If the developers were getting bad feedback from the dungeon before, it will be because players who aren’t really dungeon regulars were being railroaded into it. And the answer to that is not to annoy players like the OP by nerfing it, but to stop trying to force people to play out of their comfort zones. A lot of players are solo/explorer/story people – and many parts of the game including the storyline up to that point cater to that. Why mess it up?

I played it again last week with a PUG. I got downed once out of pure carelessness (I thought I could take more than one burst from one of those eyeball things), and towards the end I almost got downed because I got rushed by half a dozen Risen, but compared to before the nerf… wow. Yeah, I know “pressing 2 to Zhaitan” for several minutes wasn’t exactly a fun activity, but now that he goes down in less than 30 seconds… he’s an Elder Dragon, man! Yeah, we starved him and then bushwhacked him with a giant laser, but he’s still an Elder Dragon!

That said, over half the group I was in hadn’t run the dungeon before, and they were repeatedly getting downed and sometimes even killed, so maybe nerfing certain parts of it isn’t all bad. (Shrug)

I’ve done the dungeon many times on story and frankly it is lame. IT was easy before the nerf, but now, come on ANet, we’re almost falling asleep there. Do something to make it more entertaining.
I expected more from the end boss, but he was dissapointing.
PS: sorry for any grammar errors, english is not my native language.

I am extremely disappointed how they made the last personal story quest into a group dungeon run. I have solo all my way to this point and got stuck. If I want to do group run I will join a group to do whatever, why force people to group up for their own personal story right at the end?! It leaves those who enjoy soloing their own personal story an incomplete story. Very disappointing.

When I found out the last part of the story is a mandatory group exercise, I pretty much decided against even bothering to progress the stories on my five alts any further… and just wait for ESO to come out.

Yeah the dungeon as the final mission was kind of really dumb. Not only is it a little jarring to be faced with a forced grouping after a soloable storyline, but it’s also quite frustrating when often the game picks someone elses character as the “speaker” so you’re character is basically just in the background the whole time. Not to mention if you haven’t done the “story mode dungeon” questline then Arah makes no sense as DE makes references to your character bringing them all together and what not. Man, when I think of it, the main storyline in this game suffered quite a bit, but that’s a whole different discussion.

If you want your own character to be the party leader and have speaking role in dungeons, all you have to do is to be the first one to enter the instance (thus creating it).

I did that on my first (and so far only) playthrough of Arah story mode, and I liked seeing my own character participating in the dialogue.

The +/-30-50% when it comes to re-balancing things (everything from encounters to skills) speaks to a very novice level of game design experience. Especially since these changes are often made with little to no testing.

Jornophelanthas.1475:

I did that on my first (and so far only) playthrough of Arah story mode, and I liked seeing my own character participating in the dialogue.

I think we can all pretty much agree that everyone who has advanced to the last personal story mission likes seeing their own character participating in the dialouge.

That’s why the decision to not give each player a seperate cut scene showing their character was a terrible design choice (when Anet could have very easily done [Bioware also could have easily done the same in its game and the decision there not to give each player their own seperate cutscene was equally bad]). I don’t think players can stress enough just how terrible of a design decision this was.