Guild Wars 2

Lot’s of people know dark souls, mostly because of it’s unforgiving encounters, and I remember ANET telling us how explorable dungeons are only for the most skilled players.

Seeing as this isn’t the case, I’d like to propose the idea of making hard mode dungeons available for experienced people, who want real challenge.

Keep in mind though, that I’m not suggesting to rework explorable paths, what I’m saying is: create challenges for those who enjoy them.

ANET knows that the playerbase is fragmented, different people want different stuff, and that’s alright. Some like the living story, some won’t even touch it, some enjoy gear grinding, some like farming, and I’m pretty sure a lot of players (including me) like tough bossfights.

This is where dark souls comes to mind:

- Make these new encounters unforgiving.
- Attack patterns that shred the party if not countered/dodged/avoided
- Let reaction time be a deciding factor when trying to avoid these patterns (check Ornstein and Smough for reference) & the opportunity window to fight back, should be small, as is their HP pool
- Add account bound rewards/recipes as drops, so they don’t mess with the economy, but will reflect the player’s resolve to finish something that’s not easy.

I haven’t seen encounters like this in any other MMO, and from my experience, GW2’s combat system is atm the best basis for this

Opinions?

It is however quite impossible to build encounters that requires exact reaction times in an online-game since you need to take lag and such into account, making said “challenge” completely impossible for people that live far away from the servers and might suffer from lag.

A few issues:

• The option to turn off other player spell effects would need to be implemented before or alongside this so that the guy isn’t covered in particle effects, thus reducing the chance you’ll see the attack coming.
• Reaction time is all well and good, but it’d also need to take into account skill delay and lag.

If anet wanted to make the dungeons more like Dark Souls, they would actually have to make them more forgiving a fair.

I’m not even kidding.

I know that a single player game can’t be compared to a multiplayer one and
lag might be an issue, yes, but remember alpha: you can learn when to dodge by sound only, same with jade maw. Or think about the charge skill of the undead abomination in CoE. These patterns do require timing to avoid and are rather unforgiving, but not frequent enough. As a matter of fact I think undead abomination is a more interesting encounter – because of his insane speed and instagib – than alpha.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

If anet wanted to make the dungeons more like Dark Souls, they would actually have to make them more forgiving a fair.

I’m not even kidding.

Are you seriously saying the dungeons are too hard?!?!

Winch.2657:

I know that a single player game can’t be compared to a multiplayer one and
lag might be an issue, yes, but remember alpha: you can learn when to dodge by sound only, same with jade maw. Or think about the charge skill of the undead abomination in CoE. These patterns do require timing to avoid and are rather unforgiving, but not frequent enough. As a matter of fact I think undead abomination is a more interesting encounter – because of his insane speed and instagib – than alpha.

“you can learn when to dodge by sound only, same with jade maw.” Still a lag issue here, MMO latency is a big problem when making things challenging. Some people will clearly see and experience the actions coming from the game server before others. Thus making quick timing unfair to anyone without a super connection speed. There needs to be a delay between the tell of the skill being used and the actual action, otherwise you put the player base at odds with their ISP and thus hurting the games fun for them.

aeneq.1760:

Are you seriously saying the dungeons are too hard?!?!

From recollection of earlier posts it probably has to do with GW2 dungeons using “difficulty” instead of difficulty.

aeneq.1760:

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

If anet wanted to make the dungeons more like Dark Souls, they would actually have to make them more forgiving a fair.

I’m not even kidding.

Are you seriously saying the dungeons are too hard?!?!

They are not hard, they are stupid. One shot kills without warnings, trash mobs insanely OP, mobs condition spam, health pools almost infinite, poor stat scaling on players, loot rewards, no organization or coordination in party, etc, etc, etc…

Lupicus it’s the only wow-like fun fight, with the HP % and the three phases. It’s actually fun and it has a good synergy. Too bad the reward sucks.

Bingo, that was my point. Dark Souls never does any of that. There are always clear warnings for everything. Monsters don’t just go invulnerable, or reset and regain all their health. You’ll never find yourself “in combat”, with your movement speed reduced. You are allowed to hit enemies from a spot where they cannot get to you, yet their AI is good enough that they will try to climb up to where you are hiding. Dark Souls is an easier and more fair game than GW2’s dungeons. GW2 could learn a thing or two from “the hardest RPG”, if that is even remotely true.

Not sure we are talking about the same game;

• If you dont know how to play DkS then every mob is OP and kills you in a few swings.
• If you hit a mob in DkS and he cant find a path to you then he goes invulnerable/reset.
• Similarly if you kite a mob out of his comfort zone he will go back and reset (although it can be triggered again as soon as he gets inside the zone).

Neither DkS or DS are hard they are just very unforgiving to anyone making mistakes, some might consider that as hard but as soon as you get the know how that goes away.

/Q

edit: Btw both DS and DkS put mobs in places where you have little or no warning whats coming. After a while you just start to assume the worst, which is a good thing.