Guild Wars 2

So far I’m enjoying a lot of aspects of the single player experience, but one recurring design choice confuses to me. Please take this as either a request for clarification (if the choice was intentional) or a suggestion (if you were not aware)

I’m very much the explorer, and I spend my time running around the huge, rich word you have provided me with. Time and time again, I’ll find that one POI or special location that’s behind a very large amount of monsters, and this gets me very excited. I plot my course and get ready to fight my way to the objective. However, time and time again either the re-spawn timer is so aggressive, the mod density so tight, or the monster powers involve things like summoning or stealth / teleportation that puts them too close to other mod groups I find its just impossible to make any real progression. This don’t mean I can’t make it to the POI or location … I just resolve that I can’t fight my way and run head-long though the monsters. I have yet to find an instance where this didn’t work, even for things like chests that take time to open. You can run though the group and fight the monsters that follow at the chest location to eliminate the re-spawn issue and without having to worry about agro of the large amount of monsters in the area. This seems very counter intuitive to me; I’m being rewarded for skipping content and NOT fighting the monsters guarding something.

It doesn’t increase the difficulty of the game or even the task by making these monsters re-spawn so fast or making mob density this tight as you can just run to wherever you are going. It doesn’t make the encounters themselves any more “challenging” as it’s not even an issue of dying; I can sustain the fight forever, I just can’t move forward. All it does is encourage a play style where you run from point A to point B ignoring as much content as possible. This seems a shame because I would love to have the time to take it all in, fight the various monsters you have created, and explore the various locations you have created.

If you were to tone down the re-spawn, lower the amount of mobs in some high density places, and re-think some monster abilities that do nothing to increase challenge but instead make a monster extremely frustrating to fight (stealth, summon, long snares) your game would be far more appealing to a wider audience.

Agree 100% with OP; have been saying the same thing since release!

Though I did hear they are finally toning down mob density in Orr…this is a start, for sure, but it’s more of a widespread problem than that. Orr is just the worst purely because mob density there is borderline kitteno.