Guild Wars 2

Hiya.

Nothing new here. Been said many times already. . .

But I was just in an area for levels 15-25s and a waypoint was
contested. I thought I’d try help out for once, see if I could clear it, because
it’s a drag not being able to teleport there. Now I see why contested points
stay contested for ages.

What I found was a Giant, who was a Champion. He had slaughtered the whole NPC town. I started reviving a bunch of them (this is kind of exploitable by the way).
Eventually 1, then 2 more players show up and we attack the Giant.

He not only had a TON of health for our level, but he could kill the NPC guards with 1 hit. Which does make me wonder why the guards gets such cool uniforms and weapons when they’re actually that weak. But nevermind. The point was, we tried to kill the giant. He could take any one of us from full health to almost none, with 1 stone throw. Alternately he could do a huge AOE fear on us and then send a wave through the ground to knock us down. While we noticed that we were slowly killing him… We discovered that 3 times or so, he just healed himself up to full health again.
What is this?

So eventually we just left it. He’s not assaulting the town anyway. The only concequence of his actions are NPC’s laying dead and the waypoint being contested. This really needs to be looked at dear developers. I don’t want a weak boss. Just a proper one.

What do you guys think? Even IF you could kill him yourself, it would take horrendously long for most people I think. Add to that the prospect of getting lackluster rewards and you tend to create deadzones, wherever champions are found.

TL;DR The “contested” system & champion bosses need to be looked at.

I know who you’re talking about and I just giggle.

Oh but it is funny indeed ^^. Especially if seen from above and you can
see these little dogs swarming around this other, bigger dot. Then some flashes and then a mysteriously well known icon above several of their heads. A blue one.

I actually really enjoyed this encounter when I first came across it. I was one-shotted, and left the game bemused to get a sandwich. When I came back, someone was reviving me and a big team had arrived to take on this giant. Over about half an hour of taking it in turns to play cat-and-mouse with him, we managed it.

Unfortunately, every champion since has been quite another story. They always seem to be at the end of long and difficult trails through caves and mountains, past three or four veterans, in tightly confined spaces. Once I see them I know I might as well turn around and go back, because ArenaNet have designed these encounters to be pretty much impossible as a lighter class without a full squad of people.

No space for manoeuvre + respawning vets + monster health bars = turn around and fight my way back out of the cave/mountain trail. It’s not like the chest will have anything truly spectacular in it anyway.

Indeed.

And trust me, I did try tell the others there was no point. Because you NEED a huge amount of people to defeat a champion. At least easily. And huge is a term that varies, depending on where you are. If you’re in one of those low-populated areas, then huge could very well be 5+ people.

Not all champions are hidden away though. I know where there’s a champion wurm right next a waypoint, out in the open. No one has killed it yet.

Noone kills them cause it’s just not worth the time and effort TBH. It’s fun the first time you take on a champion, the 3rd time it starts too get old very quickly couple that with that you get not rewards worth the time… meh…

But ye the reason that the giant healed up was prob cause u didn’t have enough deeps. The problem with the encounters is that they are really not challenging and really not fun either because all the champion does is pam 2-3 abilities over and over and over. For the giants all they do most of the times is stomp and hurl rocks and all you do is deeps on them at ranged cause noone in their right mind would try to melee a champion because all the 1000x anti-melee skills champions have.

Fun gameplay!

That particular giant is nasty, but I’ve found a huge difference between champions. Some are not that hard to take on with 2-3 people, just slow, others like this giant have abilities that make it very hard to kite them and keep them from resetting while you revive people that got caught by his stomp. Pointless to try then without a whole gang.

I agree that some of them need a second look from the devs. Not only in how long it takes to get them down, but also how to make it worth fighting them. Right now the decision is “spend 10 minutes on this and get no loot or run the other way and find a quicker event with lots of loot and the same karma/exp?”

Been there. It took at least 20 of us and 20 min to bring him down. Interesting expirience. A lot of kiting, a lot of resing, ranged attacks only, a lot of dying before I learned how to stay far enough from him. No chest in the end, loot was something white, so next time i got to him I just passed. It’s not worth it. I was like 3-4s in deficit after he finally fell for armor repair.
Some champions are fun. Some are even soloable, but this one is to be avoided.

I’ve encountered the champion giant a couple of times. Each time I’ve left it alone because without a large group he’s impossible to fend off. The trouble is most people do this [leave it alone] so rarely does a group large enough gather to take him on.

There are at least a couple of locations where a champion spawns within aggro range of a waypoint. I’ve seen a Champion Spider defeat a string of unfortunates teleporting in at a nearby waypoint. Champion placement does need to be re-examined in some cases.

I’ve also had to abandon long chains of encounters through funnelled areas because of a final Champion that is all but invulnerable to non-DPS builds / mobs of players. In fact, if you play a non-DPS build and don’t move around with a gang even regular encounters become a problem due to the unintelligent mob respawn mechanics (i.e., they respawn waaay too fast and often within auto-aggro range). So much for getting rid of the MMO Holy Trinity.

Giving Champions millions of HPs has nothing to do with difficulty. The difficulty of a Champion is defined by whether or not player healing can outstrip the Champion’s ability to deal damage. Once that tipping point is reached, i.e., collective player healing exceeds the Champion’s capacity to deal damage, the battle outcome is decided and the millions of HPs only serve to keep the Champion alive long enough for others to turn up and join in. There is a sweet spot whereby battles against Champions can be fun, where the tipping point hasn’t quite been reached, but far more often than not Champion battles are either over instantly or will drag on near interminably toward the Champion’s inevitable doom (usually for zero player losses).

All in all the Champions system isn’t a particularly clever or innovative approach IMO; it actually seems to be pretty crude (much like the mob respawn mechanics).

I’m glad there’s others who agree with me. I’d hope they see to this.
I guess you have a point there defektive, about the HP. It’s not neccesarily how
much HP. I for one don’t run a DPS build on my Guardian :<

It’s sad that a giant in a level 15-25 area is more deadly than those humongous loot piñatas that pass for dragons…