Guild Wars 2

MISSION: “Track the Seraph”
RACE: Human (Female Elementalist)
ORDER: Order of Whispers
SUGGESTED LEVEL: 24
ACTUAL LEVEL: 26-30

The personal story mission “Track the Seraph” (an Order of Whispers mission) is flagged as level 24. Initially this mission is difficult only in placement of bad guys on top of the fort’s battlements, making it difficult to dodge or evade. The final wave of bosses in this mission however is a set of three level 26 Veteran Abominations that I had to basically throw myself at and die against repeatedly as a level 24 Elementalist. Ended up getting killed six times total, with almost all of my worn gear damaged and broken. The difficulty on this mission needs to be ratcheted waaaaaay down.

as a guardian level 28, this was faceroll before the patch. i did it yesterday.

not even endangered.
barely taking dmg.
jump in the fray with my greatsword, call the
flames, whirlspin of death, and thats it.

all k.o.

all in all, i am very surprised by this patch.

You’re a guardian, you can take hits. Elementalists cannot. I don’t know exactly how much more health and damage reduction you have than an elementalist, but it seems to be quite a lot.

I’ve had significant trouble with I think 3 story missions so far. Ironically I think I managed those abominations fine, but if all your allies die and there are several enemies left, basically you’re dead if they have stun / knockdown etc.

I fought a Champion Ettin yesterday with a group of 3 others. 95% of my health gone with one hit. Yet the warrior was up there taking the hits like he was swatting flies. And with the amount of damage I’m seeing warriors do, I’m wondering about how balanced the system is…

Avatar.1923:

as a guardian level 28, this was faceroll before the patch. i did it yesterday.

not even endangered.
barely taking dmg.
jump in the fray with my greatsword, call the
flames, whirlspin of death, and thats it.

all k.o.

all in all, i am very surprised by this patch.

You were a heavy armor wearing class that was 4 levels HIGHER than the mission’s suggested level.

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

Adjusted it for the 9/24 update. Reduced the abomination count to 2 L24 enemies, which is much more reasonable.

Thank you very much for the heads up. You will want to know however, that this is still going to be far too difficult for a big chunk of elementalists. The layout of the building combined with the way the waves come in placed me upon the battlements with three abominations charging at me. They dropped me so fast I had to get down off the battlements by way of DEATH.

This is an Order of Whispers mission. I keep going into these Whispers missions expecting them to be all “Spy” and “Covert Operatives”, but every single one turns out to be a death sentence for me. If I want missions with LESS of a combat bent to them, I pick the Vigil missions… which is just stupid because they are supposed to be the military organization.

At least with the Vigil missions, I have other soldiers wading into combat with me to support me. The Order of Whispers guys send me to my death ALONE.

tokyoshoe.6308:

At least with the Vigil missions, I have other soldiers wading into combat with me to support me. The Order of Whispers guys send me to my death ALONE.

That support is meaningless, they don’t even work as good distractions. Just wait until you get to Defending the Keep. Every friendly on the map dies in about 8 seconds and then hordes of monsters who each and every one causes poison and cripple follow you everywhere you go, not giving you any place to heal.

Personal story is a sham.

I’m pretty disappointed by this difficulty nerf. This was actually fun and challenging content, and I enjoyed fighting the three veterans on my ranger at the level (24).

Tokyoshoe, what setup were you using to fight these? A dagger elementalist would have been ideal for the close range combat, starting with Earth skills 5 and 4 to AoE bleed and to nuke with fire attunement. After that you could use lightning for control and then water, and back to earth or fire after that.

This should be very doable on an elementalist, and I’d like to know why you’d believe this would still be difficult even after the changes. The only way I could see this being difficult is if you’re adamant about using a staff in close quarters; if that’s the case then yeah, you’d have a problem.

Claiming other classes are overpowered isn’t proof that the story mission needs to be nerfed to the ground.

Not sure why I can’t edit my previous post, only have the permalink icon, but I wanted to add that at this point you have 3 utility skills and you can respec your traits if needed. Have you traited toughness or vitality? Ideally you could be using the signet that heals you every time you cast a spell and using the arcane shield with the signet that increases your crit for more damage. I can’t understand how you’re getting dropped so fast you can barely get a hit off, it sounds like you spec’d for pure power without taking survivability into account.

The only issue I find with this mission is that the NPC allies levels are way too low. Because of how easily slaughter they can be by the enemy NPCs the mission basically leaves you to handle the entire enemy mob by yourself.

I rezzed them all before the final wave and used them as brief, but useful meatshields. Mostly I found myself dodging back and forth and kept all three mobs on one side of me so I couldn’t be surrounded.

I don’t get the complaint that there’s no room to dodge. The enemies were melee, dodging from the top down to the ground would force them to chase you the long way while you can cast spells and regen a bit (the spells don’t need to hit anything to regen you with the signet). It’s an ideal kiting scenario if you want to play it that way.

It’s a tactical fight, you just have to play it smart.

I just did this mission last night and there are still three veteran abominations at the end, so I don’t think that adjustment mentioned above went through.

The difficulty of the abominations is going to vary depending on how quickly you can kill them. If you don’t finish them off fast they start to build up that fury buff over time and then they get downright unforgiving. Their speed and damage later on compared to early in the fight is just scary.

My biggest complaint with the missions is the NPC allies. As soon as you revive one he runs off to fight the nearest risen mob and dies. I just can’t revive them fast enough. And if you try killing all the risen mobs first and then attempt to revive all the allies, you can’t because the abominations show up (leaving you with a worse version of the same problem)

My Order of Whispers contact (human) bugged out and wouldn’t move from the front gate as well.

What’s actually funny about this is that it shows how unpowered the elementalist is and not so much that it is an issue with quest itself.

Tomkatt.1684:

I’m pretty disappointed by this difficulty nerf. This was actually fun and challenging content, and I enjoyed fighting the three veterans on my ranger at the level (24).

Tokyoshoe, what setup were you using to fight these? A dagger elementalist would have been ideal for the close range combat, starting with Earth skills 5 and 4 to AoE bleed and to nuke with fire attunement. After that you could use lightning for control and then water, and back to earth or fire after that.

This should be very doable on an elementalist, and I’d like to know why you’d believe this would still be difficult even after the changes. The only way I could see this being difficult is if you’re adamant about using a staff in close quarters; if that’s the case then yeah, you’d have a problem.

Claiming other classes are overpowered isn’t proof that the story mission needs to be nerfed to the ground.

As someone who’s main is one of “those classes” I can tell you flat out that we are OP in PvE compared to say an ele. That’s just how it is, and there really isn’t anyway to fix it without destroying us in PvP. The reason is that it’s relatively easy to be OP when the a.i. reacts in pretty set patterns. We can use our symbols freely because the a.i. won’t run out of it. Plenty of examples like this. My warrior (also 80) doesn’t have to use setups for his 100b. I just stand there and unload. In PvP that won’t happen. I will need to get a good stun setup first, or have the enemy under some cc and know they haven’t used a break. In PvE though I can just roflstomp, and I hardly take any damage. With Adrenal Health I"m gaining 120 health every second, with healing signet I’m gaining another roughly 200 per second. So 320 health per second, and that doesn’t count life steal triggering, or that I have heavy armor, built in defense WITH my offense etc.

Btw if you think I’m just talking out of my rear I could supply screenshots of my 80s. Really though we all know this isn’t a new concept. Classes that have light armor, and medium armor, are just getting murdered in melee range. Now if there was some talent changes so that they could say “improve toughness by 20% while wielding a melee weapon” or some such it might be different.

Warrior is my go to example though. I have excellent ranged choices. I have excellent melee choices. If I want to be ranged awesome, and I switch it up on a regular basis depending on what I’m fighting. The light, and to some extent, medium armor classes just don’t have as many options though. If they go into melee one hit on them is going to take way more of their life than mine. That’s just how the game works. On the other hand in certain dungeons ranged is pretty heavily favored, so they get at least that. Or do they? Not really because in addition to my armor, high hp pool, damage mitigation, regen, I also have really nice long range options too. My guardian is the same to some extent, his ranged options are pretty much poo though.

I also did this quest just a day or so ago and had some of the same issues.

Edge.4180:

My Order of Whispers contact (human) bugged out and wouldn’t move from the front gate as well.

I’m pretty sure I only had 2 abominations, but I definitely had this problem with the Whispers agent NPC. I also got wrecked by the stacking speed buff. Are they supposed to get that fast? It caused what felt like inescapable chain knockdowns.

To me the mechanic here was awful. I did it with a thief. There were 2 abominations that I could not break free of with speed buff signent. I tried dieing and rezing the guards as close to simultaniously as possible, but they all got one shot killed. Except for my buddy Lion Guard Williams who was apparently invincible. This had the unfortunate side effect of giving the abominations 60 seconds of 15 stacks of frenzy to go with their beserk. Once you attacked them it was very difficut to break free before they KD’s you and curbstomped you into oblivion.

I beat it by equiping a speed signet, 2 traps and running up the stairs and jumping off over and over again untill they died from the traps. The only reason I could get enough separation for this when they were amped up on frenzy was because I was able to equip a trait for switftness on evade which combined with the signet gave me a big enough speed boost to make it up the stairs before I got smoked. Fun factor = 0.

I just did this quest today as a level 28 Thief. It was really difficult to finish. The Abominations kept knocking me down and stomping me to death. Most times I barely had time to attack once before I died. I just died and restarted each time slowing grinding them down. Luckily I had several instant repair canisters. It took me about 8 restarts to kill the 2 Abominations. This quest is way to hard for anyone that has no pets or no heavy armor. Incidentally this was a cake walk with both my Ranger and my Guardian.

I had to do this mission a few months ago with a lvl 24 necro. Those Abominations kept killing me.
As a ranged character I couldn’t run anywhere without having an abominations in my way (an no, my minions didn’t help me at all). I think I died 5 or 6 times (everyone was death and my co-agent didn’t do anything at all either. Seeing how I died over and over again must have been real fun for him).

That mission felt like it should have been for the vigil. When I joined the ‘order of whispers’ I really thought I would get missions like ’sneak into some random castle, killing a few guards/abominations on your way in, discover some secret fact (about zhaitan), and report back to the order of whispers. :/

I think this is still too hard. Agen Ihan is useless as he stands by the gate, and all you have is a few very squishy lvl 16 Lionguards who get one shot killed. By the time the abominations are in, I’m down in seconds (lvl 24 thief).

Well, I finally got this done, on the 5th attempt. Mainly because for the first time in 5 attempts, Agent Ihan actually moved from the front gate and helped fight and revive the Lionguards.

I think it is really bugged and not yet fixed because I played this mission today and died like 8 times in a row, got all my armor broken and was fighting naked(well atleast my character was) even without those final boss mobs giving me a chance to press some button or click some thing!! and I was playing a lvl 46 Guardian down-scaled to lvl 26 or so and still found it near impossible to complete this story mission to progress !!!

Ad the NPCs are just useless, one of the Lionguard guy doesn’t die but doesn’t do any damage too.. and the Abominations are just too powerful, one swing at you and you are knocked down with 3/4th of your health gone…. hope they fix this bug real soon

A level 46 guardian should be able to faceroll this even pre-nerf. Is your gear up to date? Even though you’re scaled down to level 26, if your gear is still level 26 you’ll probably be weaker than someone who’s actually level 26 with level-appropriate gear due to how downscaling works. The abominations shouldn’t take out 3/4 of your health in one swing if you have gear at your level.

Buy blues off the TP (practically merch value, so it’s a few copper per full set once you resell to the merch to buy the next) and try again. There’s no reason you should be running into trouble at that high of a level.

I felt I should add to this as a level 34 thief who just killed the abominations (and is still in the mission) I literally just got murdered by the two abominations. When I switched to my bow and sat back shooting at them, I noticed they both had 25 stacks of their buff and one shot me any time they so much as used an area attack to hit me.

Also, their smash attack hit such a large area it would hit me unless I timed the dodge to happen at the moment of their attack. Being out of visual range no longer worked.
Did the buff boost the size of their aoe smashes? or was it just larger than the ones in the swamp?

I died enough for two pieces of armor to be broken. Also, Ihan was bugged out for the entire mission so far.

Just did this on my level 28 Necro (down-leveled to 24.) My gear is maxed out for my level, with trinkets, and I’m using Spectral Armor as a stun break. I’ve trained into soul reaping for my panic button death shroud. I was fine until the Abominations showed up; then, it took me four defeats to kill them. Firstly, the Lionguard are useless, they die to the trash mobs almost instantly. Secondly, Ihan does not move from the entrance at all, and will not participate unless you draw aggro to him. Don’t know if this is intentional. Maybe if the Abominations’ Frenzy buildup rate was slowed down a bit so that they’re not at 25 stacks and one-shorting you within a minute, they might be easier to deal with.