Guild Wars 2

It does get to the point where pretty much most of the story is just being zerged on by 6+ enemies at a time with useless npc help.

Jeffrey Vaughn

I just completed it as a L26 thief, but I have a build geared towards story, so take that with a grain of salt.

Quoted from a different thread but same topic. Even as a Dev you are saying you have a build for story. Seriously where is the fun in being able to play all these different traits and weapons, and play a class how I enjoy it as opposed to it doesn’t matter if you find this way of playstyle horribly boring, it is the ONLY way to get the job done without having to get from other players or guildmates in what is supposed to be a personal story.

Verteiron.8734:

Just throwing in my “Me too.” here. I’m a human Mesmer, I took the Noble/Carnival/Whispers/Skritt story paths. The personal story lines involving the Skritt and Destroyers are uniformly awful. Destroyer Crabs use a bubbling lava attack that gives no warning, appears directly underfoot, deals a fair amount of instant damage (as in, the moment the circle appears) AND requires the use of a dodge to avoid additional hits. These enemies spawn 6-7 at a time and all use the skill at once, so as soon as they “hatch” I am at half health before I can even move. The NPCs on those missions are useless, dying almost immediately (mostly from standing in the AoEs) and dealing no damage while they are alive. There is no safe place to stand that doesn’t give you chains of “Invulnerable!” while attacking. The only way I beat one of them was by dying, which apparently breaks aggro, so I was able to rez Tybalt long enough to be a distraction without doing the Benny Hill thing. It was taking me about 5 minutes to kill each wave…

And then theres me as a Guardian constantly resetting this story after completing the first section to farm 90 Claws for a full set of Rare Armor from Armorsmithing.

Something is wrong about the class balance against waves of NPCs.

I think the personal quests are just badly made/designed. A quest like “Lines of communication” (Asura>Whispers>28 versus lvl 30 “elite”) was way too hard (for a 28 Elementalist without Earth Elemental), but most times the frustrating parts are
- High number of unavoidable “pop-up” mobs.
- Mobs respawning (!) in an instanced area! Why?!
- “Evading” mobs.
- Charging / aggroing “friendly” NPCs.
- Ranged AND melee mobs with nowhere to hide (LoS).
- Dying and then ressing in the middle of the fight that killed you.
- Dying and friendly NPCs getting killed while you run back.
- Dying and Boss get health replenished.

These are not “per quest” problems, they are in all the quests. Which is why I call it bad design.

… I still love the game though I’ll just put the less than perfect stuff on hold til the problems have been ironed out

I am fed up with the opponents in personal story missions. I don’t mind it if it would just be a little challenging, but it is rediculus how it currently is. I get that ArenaNet things dungeons should be hard, that can be fun, but why do it feel like I have to ask for most of my personal story mission my friends if they have time to help me on this. And the stupid NPCs that are there to help are no help at all.

drops two cents in the bucket

I’ve enjoyed most everything in GW2 that I’ve tried so far. Personal Stories have been the exception. For example, at around level 20 or so, my Thief (now 65) had to take on “The Ringmaster” in Divinity Reach. At level 20, I think I had two utilities, a couple trait points. What got spawned on me was about 8 throw away mobs, four lieutenants and an elite. I had my short bow and my daggers, for variety of strategy and I kited and pulled them out of the group and did a half dozen other things. I still died. A lot. So much so that I gave it up and came back later after my temper had cooled.

A previous poster put it perfectly, the Personal Stories have the “killer DM” disease written all over them. I’m a tabletop gamer from way back. I’ve known several of those folks who get their jollies from killing off a group of player characters. Those guys quickly find themselves playing alone or not at all. There’s challenging your players and then there’s slapping them in the face and punishing them for not coming up with YOUR solution to the problem you’ve posed. That’s lazy game design and there’s no excuse for it. I realize this is not the tabletop, there’s limits to what you can do and the number of outs you can leave us as players and keep the challenge up. However, if you had beta players telling you this was a problem and you didn’t listen, shame on you ANet.

To close, I think there’s a basic conflict in the Person Stories design. By calling these missions “Personal Stories,” you set us up with an expectation. That being that you want to tell us a story in them. Combat should be the dressing to that story, not the meat of the meal. As it sits now, after the frustration that many of those PS missions give us, we could give a crap about what happened in your story. We don’t care that we finally succeeded in figuring out the A-B-B-A button mash combined with trait 5 linked with power 7 combo that kills the boss. All we’re feeling is angry that we had to waste an hour of our lives to get to the next line of dialogue. I don’t think anger at the designer is the emotion you want to evoke with your Personal Stories.

what makes me mad is when i am 10 levels higher than a area and it down grades me 2 levels lower than the people i am fighting. WHY? it should never bring me down lower than the people i am fighting.

Level 80 sylvari mesmer/born of dusk/green knight/order of whisper/research hylak(frog), never had problem with personal story. I died twice.

1st is to get potion from other frogs. My npc frogs died too early and I had to fight several waves of frogs by myself and I had very low dps. This one was hard. Enemey frogs kept spawning before I could rez my frogs. So I quit this quest and returned after I leveled up more and got better gear.

2nd time is to rescue the Norn vigil NPC from those nagas. I phase retreated into poisoned water and died.

Maybe because mesmer doesn’t have aoe? I don’t throw chaos storm on mobs that are fighting NPCs to aggro them. Let NPCs tank them for you while you kill them. NPCs are not meant to deal damage but to distract enemies.

I don’t know why some people are complaining. They are so easy to me as a low dps clothies mesmer. Maybe I can fool mobs with my clones? But then clones die within 1 hit. Oh I did use slyvari elite skill turret seeds to distract mobs. Turrest are very very good at lower level, lol.

Just a small hint to players with personal story hardships that might help: your equipment is down-levelled with you. Meaning if you are a LV 25 equipped with green LV 25 equipment, you are going to be powerful in all down-levelled situations. If you are LV 25 with white outdated LV 18 equipment, you are going to be extremely weak when down-levelled.

TL;DR: Setup your equipment to be the most current possible just before doing personal quests and you’ll have much less problems.

p.s.: I am not insinuating that all problems are related to this. Some quests ARE unbalanced.

IMHO some professions can deal with masses and waves of enemies more easily than others, and this is one of the big problems with story quests. It is like they used the most durable professions for most of their testing, and didn’t always take into account how other professions may have different strengths and weaknesses. This is purely anecdotal, and of course there will always be very skilled players that have few problems regardless of class or story selections, but reading this forum it seems like the most fragile professions are the ones that tend to have the most difficulties with loads of mobs in their story quests.

To be fair, I did notice changes to a couple of the very low level “holy crumbs why did I just get insta-killed by 5 mobs?!” quests I encountered in the betas, and kudos to Anet for paying attention to concerns about personal quest difficulty now.

Personally, I think they need to either:
1) Tone down most personal story quests with lots of mobs, using the squishier professions as their measuring stick.
2) Allow players to chose to only be down leveled to 2-3 levels above the quest level instead of down to the quest level.

Just my 2 copper. ^^

Risen are too fast (every story quest i have done involving them) as zombies, and hit for more damage than i can possibly heal against. as i played on my ele, i would nuke the area where the AI was holding the Risen at fort Trinity, and they all zero in on me at breakneck speeds. i also found that when doing the personal story in The Cursed Shore, respawn rate was too fast for me to handle all the mobs.

killing Risen solo takes effort and time, because i am a noob (i guess), but then the mob i just killed had respawned behind me.

i wouldn’t be so disappointed about the level dumbing, but maybe in the personal story, you could forgo the armor damages, and weaken the mobs some. also, if not, then the story missions might as well be a one shot deal (you die, you start over). Ele glass cannon does not work, i assure you, cause that’s what i rolled with until i got to Arah. “zerging” i think some call it is a waste of time and earned funds to get through each.

of course, there are players i have tried to talk with, and their in game responses are somewhat more colorful than the forum would allow. they tell me in colorful ways to man up and learn to play, or get more gold and stop complaining type arguments, which make me sad on a minor level.

I’ve been able to beat all of the personal story missions on my mesmer, save for the last dungeon one which I haven’t touched yet (waiting on the fix to the rewards), horrible bugs aside, but some of them definitely cost me quite a bit in repairs. Most of the time though, it wasn’t due to a specific step’s situation. Rather, there are three main re-occuring AI and enemy behavior problems/bugs (that people have already brought up here, but might as well bring it up again):
1) Risen Abominations max out 25 frenzy if you die and retry during the mission – The time between you dying and re spawning somehow allows Abominations to get to 25 frenzy (or is it fury? can never remember) and it pretty much doesn’t go down. This isn’t every time, but if the timing of your death was during a buffing period for the abomination, it’ll happen and you’ll return to find your entire NPC party dead and only one way of victory: dodging -everything-.
2) Enemies Focus on Player Characters – Perhaps this is due to the difference in damage you can inflict versus what the NPCs inflict or maybe it’s because in certain steps the NPCs are lax in entering attack mode at all and thus never aggro any mob, but regardless you learn early on that AoE during story missions is a very big ‘no’ in most cases. KITE TO WIN or STEALTH TO WIN became my mantras. I understand why you want specific steps, but this really is true for all of them, suggesting -every- step needs to be slowly looked at. Either that, or you need to edit NPC damage globally since this is also true for Dynamic Events (really makes some annoying when nobody else is around and they need to be completed to make the area sane). Oh…except some charr for some reason. I’ve noticed they fare a bit better as NPC allies. Or maybe they were just warriors/guardians.
3)NPCs Die Too Quickly – This actually matters more at the lower levels when you probably don’t have a full skillset to kite and stealth or somehow eek out a victory against the odds, but I’ve found that most of the NPCs die way too quickly even when the majority of the attacks are on you. Why? Well…they don’t even have GW1-level AI! Anything with AoE will wipe them as they don’t get out of the way of AoE. I can understand why you haven’t given this behaviour to most mobs yet (it would be too hard for people still learning the game), but the NPCs desperately need it to some extent. Or some skill buffs to offset it or something…but moral of the story is that their AI isn’t adequate, to the point where you likely are better off just waiting for your guild mates on each step.

I’ve had fun regardless, even considering the kiting and stealth-ing to win, but I can really understand why most people don’t want to do that.

Sjach Darasv.3729:

It does get to the point where pretty much most of the story is just being zerged on by 6+ enemies at a time with useless npc help.

Jeffrey Vaughn

I just completed it as a L26 thief, but I have a build geared towards story, so take that with a grain of salt.

Quoted from a different thread but same topic. Even as a Dev you are saying you have a build for story. Seriously where is the fun in being able to play all these different traits and weapons, and play a class how I enjoy it as opposed to it doesn’t matter if you find this way of playstyle horribly boring, it is the ONLY way to get the job done without having to get from other players or guildmates in what is supposed to be a personal story.

I’d like to know just what kind of build you’d have to create with the thief to get through the story considering thieves are absolutely rubbish at dealing with crowds in general. Their skill sets are made for picking enemies off one at a time. And even some one-on-one fights against stronger enemies become frustrating because you can’t dodge constantly like you’d need to.

I haven’t really had problems with the story and I played it through on my necro. Working on my thief next but between lvl 1-20 you can’t really build glass cannon as you won’t have enough trait points to do so. I pretty much made it through the entire story using only 2 builds on my necro, both involved being heavily specced into vit + healing and toughness + whatever the secondary stat in that tree is. I know not every build will work in the story missions, but unless you dedicate points into one of those two trees it is more like no build will work. Again I didn’t have a problem with it because those are the main trees I take first anyways since being able to survive and outlast opponents, be it mobs or other players, is key.

Personally, I think it would go a long way to fix the pesonal story issues if the game’s AI was fixed. Or, at the very least, the developers were willing to explain how their aggro system works. As it currently stands, the largest problem is the tendency of the mobs to totally beeline for the player, regardless of how many NPCs are available as a distraction. Any way that could be mitigated would go a long way toward fixing the difficulty issues.

Also, as a player who’s currently leveling a thief:

Double Daggers, the Uncatchable talent, high condition damage, and lots and lots of stealth. Between the sheer amount of evasion and get-out-of-combat-free cards, you can bleed any group of mobs to death, given enough time.

1 – Ringmaster fight in human city. Necromancer. Way too many mobs with way too many HP, all aggro at once. Friendly NPCs didn’t scratch them and died way too fast.

I basically died over and over, trying to take 1 NPC with me each time. I found no way to split them up either, so I can take on one at a time.

2 – The later quest where you have to save NPCs from undead in the swamp near/in the Sylvari area. It is a post “choose-your-faction” mission. I was playing a Sw/Pi black powder thief.

WAY too many undead spawn and rush you. Again, the NPCs do little damage and get ripped to shreds. I won by running around kiting with my shortbow for a good 10 minutes with a giant mob chasing me down. I died a few times … usually because more mobs spawned and rushed from a different direction, or I bumped into terrain (argh, tree roots & rocks!) and my 2 or 3 step lead fell apart.

Now, good balance: Very early human commoner story quest where you go to the Inn in town and bandits show. There are a few of them, but the friendly NPCs hold their own enough to kill their target, or at least keep it busy enough til you can help.

You can engage the unfriendlies in manageable numbers.

… frankly, WAY too many story mode quests turn into “ZOMG kite kite kite!!!” situations. Friendly NPCs drop dead, and you cannot take the time to revive them. I do not feel heroic running through every story map with a slew of mobs chasing me, trying to get them stuck on terrain or abuse pathing (almost feels like I’m forced to semi-exploit) to squeeze off a couple AoEs.

I found most of these encounters felt not too “difficult” but too “imbalanced”. I never felt like I lost because I screwed up, or chose bad tactics, or got distracted and wasn’t paying attention… I always felt like I lost because the game was throwing an unwinnable situation at me unless I resorted to cheese tactics. I couldn’t “play smart to win” or “utilize my class’ strengths”, it was backpeddle & kite or quit in frustration.

I honestly wonder how someone who doesn’t have a lot of MMO experience (or gaming experience in general) could handle some of the more imbalanced-feeling encounters. I’ve seen a few solid rants in guild chat about story mission difficulty and these are MMO/gaming veterans quite often.

Ha, finally a place where minion master necros shine! I find that (instant-death jumping puzzles aside) I’ve been able to complete the story missions successfully, although they certainly push me pretty hard, and I’ve learned to NEVER do them underleveled. Typically I find that the “mass mobs” missions (which honestly are about 1 in 3 missions, and I found a lot especially during the “lead up to choosing a faction” missions for humans) go in two phases: first, my minions and the NPCs all charge into battle. I fight and do what I can, and then I suddenly discover I’m all alone: the minions and NPCs have all died. Fortunately I can resummon the minions, and all that killing has typically left the remaining mobs spread out fairly well, which allows me to kite/snipe them. If you can drop out of battle to heal up or rez an NPC, that helps a lot. Then there’s usually the boss left, for whom NPCs are indeed worthless.

I understand that you don’t want NPCs doing all the work and the players just coasting, but maybe if the NPCs at least had more health, that would help some people? Even if they did not do more damage?

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

My thief build is sword+pistol, with utility skills varying by level. Blind works wonders against both groups and single bosses. Black Powder will reapply blind for a few seconds in its area of effect. Pistol whip can lock down a single target. If I get in trouble, hide in shadows, smoke screen, and/or roll for initiative can save the day. (If nothing else, I can stealth for long enough to heal, which will stealth me again.) Ironically, I stumbled on the build with my “live” thief so I could take on skill challenges and veterans solo.

Now don’t get me wrong—I totally agree that some of the steps are too hard. I’ve played this game a lot, so facing 3 mobs at once is no big deal, but I recognize that it’s too much for most players, and the early steps (L1-20) in particular need to be toned down. But I simply don’t have enough hours in the day to play through every single story step and make adjustments, which is why I keep asking for specifics.

Also, not to start an argument, but expecting every story step to work for ANY build is not realistic. If you want to build a glass cannon, you can’t expect to never die, and you can’t expect your particular favorite build to work all the time.

How about NOT play each single story step and just tone down all “waves of enemies” type of encounters across the board? I mean the player is just 1 guy and it’s not like you’re going to fix NPC AI for every single encounter any time soon so they’re practically useless right now.

I just don’t understand the thought process of that went through when these encounters were designed. How did you really expect a single person to handle fast spawning waves of multiple enemies alone? I mean sure, maybe guardians and warriors could get by but did you even consider how certain classes that don’t have strong solo AoE, like Mesmers, could get by?

To be honest, this is one of the reasons I’ve totally stopped playing the personal story. It is SO discouraging when you are 10 levels above the supposed level of step in the story but you are puppied because of dynamic scaling (though I have really nothing against dynamic scaling it’s just that it exacerbates the situation) and the only way you can complete it is by dying and rezzing over and over again.

I don’t mean to come off as hostile. It’s just really frustrating hearing that you, as content designer, has to MANUALLY check each step just to verify and fix this issue. The inefficiency of this process is mind boggling especially in this day and age of modern software engineering methodologies. It’s not like GW2 was developed in the 80’s in some guy’s basement using QBasic, right?

What, was Guild Wars 2 developed using spaghetti code? Is there no search and replace function in the event scripts? Are there no in house tools developed to make it easy for content designers to maintain the game’s content? Are there no usage statistics or tracking that show the percentage of people that are dying repeatedly over some step that alerts your content design teams that “hey maybe something’s wrong here, let’s focus on this”?

Jeff I know you are doing your best but this method (checking forums for people having trouble with quests) is not only extremely inefficient, it also does not capture issues that may be ongoing but nobody has been annoyed enough yet to post in the forums.

Please kick your developers on their behinds if they seriously designed the code with such poor maintainability that content designers have to resort to crowd sourcing just to discover issues and get things fixed. I am not pretending to know better but issues like this just betray the fact that something must have gone terribly wrong during the technical design phase since situations like this were not accounted for.

Since so many are saying everything is too hard & it seems like you actually want to adjust things like that then please listen to my side too…
I sadly find basically all the story quests too easy so far (Not just story quests but the game in general, although there are some fun encounters, that’s not what is being discussed here though). I only did Asura, Sylv & human but I can’t imagine the other 2 being that much worse.

I don’t have to kite for ages, I have not one heavy armour class & I play both melee & ranged. Yes, I occasionally get downed, however I time it so I manage to get up in a second & really dying with any character does almost never happen & if it does it’s mostly because I made a mistake or did something silly.

Just my take on it.

Agreed with whoever said every single mission is this way. There is no need for specifics. It’s every mission, and the hero’s AI accompanying you is freaking stupid. You might as well accompany me with a short bus full of those people to help me complete these missions. It would be better.

Maybe someone could clear this up for me: Why does the Personal Story HAVE to be such challenging content? There is already so much content in this game that is truly challenging.

It’s a Personal Story. Why should we have to do so much Meta-Game processing for our story lines? It’s RP content for kitten’s sakes. As was mentioned above it feels like the devs have “killer DM syndrome”.

I love the challenge out in the world or in the dungeons but shouldn’t the Personal Story quests be accessable to everyone? Not just the people who are great at meta-tuning their builds or people who decided to roll Rangers/Guardians.

I have 2 Ele’s (Sylvari 47/Asura 25)and a Mesmer(Asura 15). So far all the vast majority of personal story quests have shown me is what I look like lying on the floor while waves of enemies dance on my corpse.

Granted I could always take a step back and Meta each one. Changing builds, weapon combos, strategies.. Why? If there was ever a part of the game that screamed RPG not MMO, it should be the Personal Story.

I’m personally done with them. Until I can progress my personal story without having to “do the math” I just wont bother. I wish I were alone on this, but there’s a lot of people just throwing their hands in the air and moving on to whatever else.

It’s really not as simple as it sounds.

A spawn group might consist of 5 creatures. “OMG!” you say “Make that 1 creature! Fixed!” But you might not realize that there are also 5 allied NPCs, so now this one creature is going to get swarmed and killed in seconds.

If we ever had 5 allied NPCs that were actually useful in a fight, we wouldn’t have threads like this one. Allied NPCs hit with nerf bats. Here’s video proof And this is not an isolated case. With very few exceptions, friendly NPCs do not do any real damage. They are there only for show.

Maybe this is the root of the problem with story missions, since they almost always have these worthless friendly NPCs. If the developers have balanced the combat with friendly NPCs in mind, they might want to make sure they have weapons that do more than 1-2 damage per hit.

I am currently a lvl 69 Human Ele (Vigil storyline) and I tell you this. I didn’t find ANY of storyline missions hard. Every single one can be done with some skills. Yes, some of them are challenging that’s true, but I still I don’t think they need to be touched at all. My bro has ranger (lvl 73, Order of Whispers) and he was able to do all missions so far without any problems. Oh, and he is 13

Same experience as above. Guild of around 25ish people, all different classes (we’ve got one of each class, minimum) – not a single one of us have found it difficult. Are people just not using…dodge? I don’t understand. If you made this any easier, there would be literally no challenge and you could afk while the NPC’s kill the guys for you.

Please, don’t dumb this game down any further – the difficulty is at a nice state where you can die if you don’t pay attention, but if you dodge and make use of cooldowns you’re rewarded by success.

I haven’t walked through every quest, but I haven’t come across one in any of my characters that I thought was too hard.

Not being able to complete a personal quest the first or third time is not something I get upset about. I love it. It makes me think about the situation & build, make adjustments and try something new. This is how I learn exactly how weapons/skills/stats work with each other. I want to know how to beat the quest and why it works that way.

I know that there are probably quite a few personal story quests that should be adjusted and tweaked a little here and there, but if something happens to make them easier across the board, it’ll only reduce the game play to mindless button pushing.

tl;dr – Contribute to the solution or rant pointlessly. Your choice.

Arodin.2614:

I understand it’s hard to have to make adjustments to 400 story missions, but in my experience it’s the majority of them that are out of whack…

Unless your experience includes > 200 of them, you need to revisit the definition of ‘majority’.

Jeff’s been very responsive and fixed multiple missions that have been specifically identified by players. You cared enough to make a 4+ paragraph post about it, but listing ‘character race/level/mission name’ is too much work? It takes less than 2 minutes to drop that info in one of these threads when you run across a ridiculous mission.

Arodin.2614:

Here’s another problem with asking us to report on specific missions: once I’ve played the mission and endured the hardship of it, I really don’t care anymore if you fix it or not. I’ve already played it and chances are I’m never going to play it again. Sure it would help the next guy to come along, but what good does that do me? Maybe that’s selfish, but hey I paid for this game. This isn’t beta, so we’re not in a “I just want to help make this game as great as possible” state of mind, we’re in the “I payed $60 for this game and I want my personal experience to be as great as possible.” That means I really don’t care about the story missions I’ve already played and can report about, I mostly want you to fix the story missions that I haven’t seen yet so they won’t suck by the time I get to them.

For that to happen someone higher level than you would need to take the time to report the mission even though it wouldn’t benefit them personally. Someone not like you, I mean.

Arodin.2614:

From the posts I’ve seen it seems to me that a pretty clear message has been given from the players to the developers: the vast majority of story missions are too hard and needlessly frustrating. There must be a more efficient solution than to wait until someone posts a message on the forum about every single story mission in the game before you act on it.

I hope you are right about this. In fact, Jeff hinted in one of his posts about potential bigger changes that it was too soon to talk about. Maybe they will figure out how to do a massive rebalancing sweep without breaking other stuff (I really hope so) but until then the only way get stuff fixed is to specifically report it. See tl;dr above.

Personally the only two story steps I found difficult were “Pastkeeper” (pre-patch), and “Lines of Communication”.

Rakt was just annoying to fight, being scaled to 1-2 levels below him as a thief… if I recall he was 30 and I was effectively 28. What I ended up doing there was dragging him right next to the checkpoint and using venoms to keep him from resetting when I died, because when you die right next to spawn there is no loading screen nor enough time for the mobs to reset.

In Pastkeeper’s last stage, what I ended up doing was leaving the enclosed area before the Imp stage, because you get nuked with cripples/chills otherwise. Then had tybalt tank the big one and keep it from resetting while I ran up and down the mountain, destroying the enemy altars (that spawned there, because of where I was when the stage began) and firing short bow and hitting thieves guild whenever off CD. Note: this was before they fixed the checkpoint booting you from the instance. Which I thought was intentional tbh, because it only began with the last stage, I figured it meant that the idea was to either complete the ritual or ‘fail’ it and have to start the instance over.

Edit: for the record I did all my instance solo, usually at appropriate levels, few times couple levels above or below.

Also, Early Parole was annoying, because you couldn’t stealth it to the door no matter what you did… I get that you have to fight once you open the door, but what is the point of the stealth minigame if you can’t get to the door without being “found out”.

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

Rakt should have been 28, I’ve adjusted him down. Some of the older bosses were upscaled to make them tougher, but later we got some other ways to buff them. In some cases, the old level boost was left in place AND the new buffs were added, which is making them a lot harder than we intended.

That explains a lot, thanks.

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

I’ll check out Early Parole tomorrow, I need to go home and feed my cat.

You can get pretty close to the door, but even with infiltrators arrow at the door (just before opening it) someone would always get aggro’ed. Thankfully trehearne is an ample distraction, but I intentionally redid the story instance multiple times because I wanted to open the door undetected.

Now, I did not try combining infiltrators arrow with shadow refuge (for its long stationary stealth), that might have done the trick, but you would have to have pretty fast fingers.

It has been quite a while since I did that story step, but I recall even trying to circle around to the carneval area and approach from there… btw, if you do circle around and never use the bridge that triggers the sequence explaining the minigame, then you eventually get forcibly teleported to the bridge for the sequence.

I really wanted to avoid engaging anything in the minigame phase of the instance, to the point where I started to memorize (not intentionally) the pathing of some of the NPC prior to just before the door.

The problem was never the guards with the “detection circles”, more often than not it would be the mercs that got aggroed when I was trying to get to the stairs in front of the door.

Could you guys not introduce a similar question system that you had in the Beta’s. Where at the end of each mission you’re asked a few questions about how you found it?

Obviously you could change the questions to reflect many of the points made here, Rate the difficulty, 1 -5, Where the NPCs helpful 1-5.. that sort of thing?
That would be the most efficient way for you to collect information.

MerryBelle.3917:

This is really garbage. I’m tired of either dying or running around in circles while npcs kill off everything.

Your NPCs kill things? Neat.

Mine are mediocre speed-bumps (“meat shield” would be giving them far too much credit).

Specifics? “The battle of Claw Island” but it’s pretty much across the board. I haven’t developed/tested the game for years and I’m not inclined to beat my head against the wall trying to get to that level the hard way.

Is it fun? Really? It’s ridiculous. I don’t want it easy but I don’t want dungeon-level aggravation in my personal story.

The NPCs aren’t effective against… Well anything Mr. Vaughn. They’re downright suicidal in most cases, charging into enemies and getting downed within seconds.

Having as many enemies as you do would work OK if the friendly AI were competent, but they’re mostly limited to seeing a single enemy, charging at it, and then attracting and ignoring the ensuing swarm.

I had little trouble with the first 2 parts of the story arc because in terms of numbers, I was on equal footing with the enemy. They didn’t kill anything effectively, but they did break up the crowds. Now that the undead have appeared, we’re outnumbered and they tear through any NPC in seconds. They have much too high a spawn density for most players.

I’m not playing a glass cannon, my thief is being speced for survival instead of DPS. But it’s not possible to give him enough HP or toughness to outlast a small army. Stealth skills and blinds don’t work if you can’t separate one or two enemies from a group of 7-8. Blind only lasts for 4 seconds and stealth backstab only hits one enemy at a time.

It turns into a game of repetition where you try to kill one enemy, flee to regen your health, and then repeat. I really hope that’s not how you intended the game to play like.

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

It’s really not as simple as it sounds.

A spawn group might consist of 5 creatures. “OMG!” you say “Make that 1 creature! Fixed!” But you might not realize that there are also 5 allied NPCs, so now this one creature is going to get swarmed and killed in seconds.

When do these allied NPCs that will swarm and kill a mob start showing up? I am at the 71 quest for Sylvari Green Knight/Vigil, and have yet to see any.

But seriously – if you are assuming the allied NPCs are useful – well, that’s probably the source of most player issues.

Perhaps there’s a bug, but through to the level 71 quest for that Sylvari (guardian, btw) and only to the 16 quest on human streets/circus (mesmer), I’ve only seen one marginally useful ally NPC (that followed me), and that was Caithe, and she disappears from the story quests at, what, level 20ish?

For an example – the one Vigil quest where you defend the beach vs undead (ends with risen abominations), I got the invaders down to 1 remaining abomination, there were maybe 3 vigil defenders still alive (and like 30 corpses all over the beach). As I wasn’t getting any XP (that I could tell) from killing the mobs, I decided I would start reviving the vigil defenders and get them all up before the last abomination was killed.

But that was not to be.

For starters, their AI is absolutely horrible. Most would run headfirst into the abomination and die within maybe 10 seconds of engaging him. Some would revive the nearest corpse and then the 2 of them would run headfirst into the abominiation an die within maybe 15 seconds of engaging him. But the REALLY stupid ones would run headfirst to the abomination, but stop and start reviving a corpse at his feet, and die within like 5 seconds.

When it was down to just that one abomination – his health was in the 75-80% range, and he was engaged with 2 or 3 defenders (which is why I was able to start reviving). After a good 20 or possibly 30 minutes of reviving defenders non-stop, his health was around 50% and there were still only 2 or 3 defenders alive.

Your NPCs are simply ineffective and have moronic AI, so if you are including them in your caculations, I would suggest either make them effective and not moronic, or stop including them.

Of the 3 major NPCs I had with me on the sylvari – Caithe, Traeherne and the big Norn guy – only Caithe was marginally useful. The big Norn guy died, early, in every mission that had more than 3 mobs at once, so his cutscene later on, that I suppose should have been touching, was more of a laughable thing to me.

The other major issue is the bad DESIGN of many of the missions.

1 – Talk to NPC, who is stationary.

2 – Move to NPC and hit F – on to cutscene.

3 – Cutscene ends and instantly 5 mobs spawn surrounding the player and NPC.

4 – Mobs mob the player into death, because the NPC isn’t targetting and doesn’t really do anything useful while the player dies.

5 – Respawn and head back.

6 – NPC is now dead so proceed to pull the group 1 at a time – since we now have, you know, time to plan a strategy.

7 – Finish an unfun mission (provided nothing bugged out later).

That’s a pretty accurate summary of nearly half of the missions I’ve played.

A specific example I can think of, was in Against the Corruption. Where you have to escort Trehearne to the tombs in Orr.
The problems arose when I was totally not expecting an undead abomination to spawn in the doorway. Playing as an ele, geared towards damage and healing I usually make an effort to heal the NPCs. In this instance I didn’t because the abomination was targetting me, and only me. As I can’t really take much damage before dying I mostly ran around keeping him immoblized and chilled to slow him down while I fired damage spells at him. In this instance I died, and respawned back at the base where you start the mission. As I ran up to the entrance to the tombs I realised all the NPCs who were with me were dead. facepalm
I rezzed the nearest one who then ran directly at the abomination, th abomination then summoned 3 risen and the NPC died. I looked for Trehearne and rezzed him, the exact same thing happened. So then I realised I was going to have to fight this thing by myself. Which, even for an ele who utilizes all 4 elements, was difficult. At one point during the fight, I think something tirggered and the abomination just stopped taking damage, ran back to the doorway and regenerated.
I literally stared opened mouthed at my computer because I knew when I re-engaed it in a fight, it would summon 3 more risen and the most difficult part of the fight was dealing with 4 targets by myself.

After a lot of hard work I managed to kill the abomination, and ressurect all the NPCs. Trehearne then refused to move for some reason, and I couldn’t continue the quest. (His movement was fixed in the last update, and I have now managed to do it) but as my first experience of this quest it was awful. Especially as I went through all the hard work just to encounter a bug.