Guild Wars 2

I have a theory on why so many people differ on the difficulty of the Story quests: lag. I began to have the idea while playing though with my Elementalist. From my previous experience with games that have lag, I can kind of just tell when it’s happening (either from plain old internet connection problems/slow-down or from server instability).

When this occurs, Enemies don’t appear to take as much damage, selecting targets becomes more difficult, Player health regen slows down, Enemies become invulnerable, Enemies start their regen in battle, Player burns all cooldowns without effect, Enemies queue up their damage, and the lag compensation fast-fowards the Enemies damage for what seems like 1-hit or 2-hit kills, argo pulls pile up, etc.

I tested this when doing a story quest and the server crashed a few days ago. Right before (or during the crash) the quest was insanely difficult (the symptoms described above). After the restart, the difficulty seemly was much improved and reasonable (at the intended level I suppose). I think the players are misidentifying the lag issues I described as a problem with the intended difficulty level.

These problems are more evident for players of the squishy classes especially the Elementalist from what I’ve gathered about threads complaining of under-powered-ness (Elementalist may be under-powered, I’m not suggesting either way). I think the Elementalist is just more ill-prepared to deal with the consequence of enemy zerg and piled up (queued) damage hitting all at once.

Hopefully, the devs can consider whether my theory has some merit, perhaps put some of their in-house testers on a setup that intentionally increases lag, emulating distance from server or something. I assume the in-house testers are basically sitting on top of the server and not really experiencing any sort of lag except on server instability.

If my theory is correct, adjusting difficulty of the story mode, or trying to rebalance classes, would be the wrong solution despite the reports and requests being made.

Thanks,
Ken