Guild Wars 2

I don’t really know where to start here, but I’ve seen an increase in the amount of content Anet is nerfing and I don’t understand why you want to take the challenge out of everything.

For a start, in BWE 3 you nerfed the normal open world mobs so the levelling up part became much easier, some professions can even tank mobs their own lvl for several minutes without getting killed (you regenerate health faster than the mob can deal damage to you) this pretty much killed on of the games big sales point the “fluid combat where player have to think about timing and position” now you can just do as in most mmos, stand infront of the mob and hit 1-5. Even veteran mobs can be bought down without dodging or kite:ing.

Secondly the dungeons, I understand that a lot of people find them hard to do in pugs, but you stated that the explorable versions of dungeons was for experienced groups. Still you nerfed several dungeons because pugs could not complete them and in some of these nerfes you even obliterated the boss mechanics. Take the last boss in CoF Path 1. He was hard before, I give you that, but now you can completely ignore his mechanics, just run up to him, spam 1-0 for a few min. No challenge at all.
The only good designed boss that’s actually is still difficult is Lupicus.

And Thirdly; I just read that the guy who created The Clock Tower, apologised to everyone who couldn’t complete Clock Tower and said he would not design content this hard again for holidays.
What’s the point of a achievement like the on you get IF you complete Clock Tower, if it’s not supposed to be hard?
What’s the point of any achievements if Anet should just “hand them out to people”?
Isn’t it supposed to be hard? So only a limited amount of the player can complete it?

All this nerfes is causing two things; People who complain won’t ever learn how to get better, if Anet just give them everything they cant get themselves.
And people who actually like a challenge will stop playing because everything is to easy.

I for once can’t stand levelling up another character to lvl 80, simply because it’s so easy it fells like a huge grind.
Getting bored of the dungeons because there is no challenge in them any more.

I’m not suggesting that you should make everything hardcore so only a small amount of the players can complete anything in the game.

I’m simply suggesting that instead of nerfing everything just because some players can’t do it, help them.

For instance I played AC with a lvl 5x who didn’t even know you could dodge in this game. I saw tons of people getting killed by one of the easier champions (Giant champion in charrs 15-25 zone) simply because they didn’t even try to dodge his attacks. Fire elemental (Asura 1-15 zone) got a nerf, and Anet apologised and stated it wasn’t their intention to create such a hard boss. So was Fire elemental that hard? No, I tried him out in BWE3, first time I was there I decided to just watch what people where doing and why they got them self killed so much, first of the “Death box” aka the bridge. Fire elemental used a 1-shot attack on this bridge and people got constantly killed by it, why? Because they tried to just run over it.
You could make it over this bridge easily by simply double dodging over it.

You could fix all these problem by simply creating a better tutorial.
As of now, there is nothing in the tutorial/prologue that tells you about the dodge function, so no wonder people don’t know about it.

As of right now you just get thrown into a game without any guidance (or well you have the Hint system now that helps, but no enough) and people who played other MMOs that don’t have dodging or “Dynamic events” will stick to what they know; stand still in front of mobs, and only talk to a NPC with a “quest icon” over there head.

This applies to the “to low XP whine” we saw on the forums during the beta. People where running from heart to heart, and once all hearts where completed, they thought they done every quest in that area, but they where to low lvl to go to the next area.

You have a NPC (a scout to be exact) that people are supposed to talk to after the prologue, does he/she tell the player about Dynamic events, and how they work? No, he/she just points out hearts on the map and explains that the hearts are quests, so no wonder people don’t really know how Dynamic events work.

Don’t nerf the game, just explain how it works to the people who need it.

I am against trivializing content.
However, I also against poorly telegraphed 1-shot mechanics in a game with so much particles and flashy effects going on during combat.

Dungeon Veterans taking 100% of your health in 2-second multi-hit attacks is ridiculous.

The game is too much of a kitefest right now, and alot of things need to change.
Just nerfing it won’t work.
Something else needs to be done.

There have been a lot of newer MMO’s over the last few years that have ruined the only fun things about them because some people couldn’t complete them. If you think about it, its terrible for business.

It took me a good 4-5 hours of attempts to complete that clock tower. You know what that means? It means I played for 4-5 hours. When it comes to instances, that can be longer. People complain about things being hard, but the drive to beat them is what keeps them playing.

After I completed the tower, I felt great! I literally jumped out of my seat. And you know what I did then? I went back to it to try a few more times to make sure I could do it again!

Remember that there is a difference between the majority of players and the loudest players.

-Hawcinn/Barborin

I can’t really speak fairly to the dungeons as I haven’t done many of them. However, as to the clocktower… I honestly would like to see something like that again. Yes. It took me 15hours to complete it. (total, not straight) However, the challenge was amazing. And yes, I wanted to give up and call it quits after the first several hours. But I didn’t and when I finally completed it, it was amazing. That feeling is the purpose of hard content. If you want to make an easier or ‘training’ version, I wouldn’t be against that. For example, they could have allowed you to climb the clocktower we sat and stared at while waiting just to get a feel for the climb before charging into the timed version. However, do not avoid making hard content because some people don’t want to put forth the effort to get it. If they really want it bad enough, they will put in the time and effort to get it. And they will be rewarded with that amazing feeling in the end.

Just as a side note, those were 15hours I would have spent ingame anyway. So what if I spent them climbing a clocktower while trying to outrun the nasty green fog that was ever on my tail?

Barborin.4721:

There have been a lot of newer MMO’s over the last few years that have ruined the only fun things about them because some people couldn’t complete them. If you think about it, its terrible for business.

It took me a good 4-5 hours of attempts to complete that clock tower. You know what that means? It means I played for 4-5 hours. When it comes to instances, that can be longer. People complain about things being hard, but the drive to beat them is what keeps them playing.

After I completed the tower, I felt great! I literally jumped out of my seat. And you know what I did then? I went back to it to try a few more times to make sure I could do it again!

Remember that there is a difference between the majority of players and the loudest players.

-Hawcinn/Barborin

Totally agree on this, I love the felling of accomplishment. However I’ve only felt this a few time during my hundreds of hours in GW2; First time my group killed Kholer, first time we killed Lupicus and when I soloed Fire Elemental.

I rather spend 5H on a really difficult challenge, than just run it trough in 30min.

Also, with to much easy content, the content will run out faster, resulting in that players get bored of the game faster.

And this “Remember that there is a difference between the majority of players and the loudest players.” is something Anet have to take note to. People wont come to the forums and create topics about how awesome the effigy boss in CoF was. But people who find it hard Will complain.

Barborin.4721:

There have been a lot of newer MMO’s over the last few years that have ruined the only fun things about them because some people couldn’t complete them. If you think about it, its terrible for business.

It took me a good 4-5 hours of attempts to complete that clock tower. You know what that means? It means I played for 4-5 hours. When it comes to instances, that can be longer. People complain about things being hard, but the drive to beat them is what keeps them playing.

After I completed the tower, I felt great! I literally jumped out of my seat. And you know what I did then? I went back to it to try a few more times to make sure I could do it again!

Remember that there is a difference between the majority of players and the loudest players.

-Hawcinn/Barborin

While I agree with the sentiment that the clock tower is a great example of how content can be challenging in just the right way (it’s the first jumping puzzle in the game I’ve legitimately ENJOYED and had fun playing up until I finally beat it a little over 90 minutes in)….

It’s worth noting that the clock tower DID only have about a 5% completion rate according to the dev. So “the majority of players” in this case would be the ones complaining, NOT the folks like us who enjoyed the challenge.

And that being the case, what do you do now? Do you start disregarding the majority because they’re all a bunch of “girly men” or something? :P

This is the difficult decision that the devs face with regards to making up their minds how future content will be created. And I don’t envy them that.

You honestly mean it was just a 5% completion rate? or you just picked a random number? Sure it was a challenge, but it wasn’t that hard?

I thought at least 70% would have made it.

but then also, did they just check; 5% of all accounts made it (even those who didn’t try Clock tower) Where people who just gave it 1 or 2 tries counted into this? There is a great many ways to make something sound harsher than it’s.

That’s the number the devs themselves gave during the Shadow of the Mad King release. It was never clarified if that was just a ballpark estimate, or if it was, in fact, roughly accurate.

Regardless of what it was, though, that rate would seem to suggest that the clock tower was indeed pretty difficult. It certainly took me longer than any other jumping puzzle in the game, though admittedly it was also by far the most fun I’d ever had with any jumping puzzle in the game.

And if, indeed, that figure is even close to accurate, what do you do? Ignore the 95% who failed to cater to the 5% who didn’t? Like I said, I hardly envy them the decision between catering to those of us who LOVE a good challenge, and those of us who struggle and get easily frustrated by them.

Clock tower example is an extreme (which I promptly realized is impossible to do for me, like Spekk’s lab) since I am unable to manuever with a mouse an am limited to keyboard moving) so I left it within 30 minutes. However, I will debate that the reward for completion of dungeons is definitely underwhelming.

Wish Anet developers would go that extra mile to make their timed puzzles and special events adaptable, that would increase the time per number of times tried. If they did that then even some of us old farts could complete them. But I guess it is a game for the young.

How do you mean when you say that dungeon rewards are underwhelming? I’m not trying to jump you or anything, but I’ve seen a lot of people talking about the rewards for dungeons are not good enough or worth the time and this I don’t understand, so if you don’t mind I would like to “hear” your point of view.

Here’s how I see it. I spend like 12-50 minutes in a dungeon (Longer for some arah paths tho.) And for that 12-50 minutes, I get 26Silver, 2K karma, 60 tokens and blues and greens worth maybe another 15S and if I’m lucky I can get a core worth 6S-1G (depending on which one) If I do 3 runs in the same dungeon I’ll get 78Silver, 6K karma loot worth a minimum of 45Silver (1,23gold in total) and enough tokens to buy a Exotic helm, gloves or boots. To me this seems like quite a good reward.
Free exotics (worth 1~5G/42K karma) karma that otherwise would take me 20 events to get and gold that would take me 30-60 minutes to farm.

And I even preferred when you only got 30tokens per run (To easy to get full exotic now)

“And Thirdly; I just read that the guy who created The Clock Tower, apologised to everyone who couldn’t complete Clock Tower and said he would not design content this hard again for holidays. "

I don’t agree with you here – stuff this hard deserves to be in the game, but not bound to a holiday event. In case you misread, he said he will keep designing things but just not do an event THIS hard during a holiday.

Also, Lupicus is honestly kitten The boss is exploitable, and just a kitteny DPS test. I liked the CoF P1 boss, but Lupicus’ potential quad use 1 shot skill spamm is rediuclously annoying. I’d prefer more mechanics like Arah P2’s spider cave, since that’s fun and not just exhaustively boring (unlike the mine field and snipers of arah P2. . . Beatable, yes. Boring. Dear god yes.)

“To easy to get full exotic now”

Please stop confusing hard with time consuming.

Did you misread GADefence? I clearly said “he would not design content this hard again for holidays” so how can you say “In case you misread, he said he will keep designing things but just not do an event THIS hard during a holiday.” Since it’s exactly what I wrote ^^

Secondly, I never stated that I think things this hard should NOT be in this game, rather I created this thread since I WANT thing this hard in the game.

About lupicus, personally I don’t know any way to exploit him, nor do I which to know a way, however I kind of like him, he has good mechanics, 3 stages, and you have to think a bit to beat him, not just tank and spank.

About “To easy to get full exotic now”, there you have a point, guess I should have formulated that sentence better, since technically, it’s not “easier” to get exotics now, it just takes less time. ^^

On the topic of the clocktower, the OP is correct in that its creator felt a bit bad and made the decision not to do such challenging jump puzzles for future holidays. He agreed with the opinion of players that holiday content should be readily accessible and entertaining with minimum frustration. Granted that the clocktower was completely optional, but that was a decision that I believe he felt would be more in the spirit of happytime holiday events.

With this being said, he has not said anything about himself stop making difficult jump puzzles like the Clock Tower. He will continue to add very difficult jump puzzles of this caliber to be added in other ares of the game but just not be specific to the holidays. This also doesn’t mean we won’t see jump puzzles during the holidays. They just won’t be that difficult.

So now they will make it easier to get Legendary, Hurray.
Don’t they realize that if they make every thing easy or less time consuming, people will run out of content faster and get bored of the game faster.

I’ll probably “stop” playing after I get my legendary, since I would have no goal after that.

Probably just sign in 2-3 times a week when my guild have WvW events but that’s all.

I do not understand what Anet are thinking, why do they care how much time we spend in their game? That’s not how they’ll earn money, they’ll get money from the Gemshop.
This post is taken from Examiner and explains it very good.

“This makes no sense. Seriously, it doesn’t.

Adding a gear grind to a game with NO SUB FEE. What’s the point? Whether I get my gear over the next 6 months, or whether I get it playing 24 hours a day the next week – Anet gets the same amount of money from me. Which is none, aside from what I buy in the gem store.

Where is the horizontal progress that should be paying the bills? Where’s the new gem store skins? Non-event minis? Weapon skins? New townclothes? New cosmetic slots? Housing? All stuff we would have to drop real money on for gems, and would do so gladly because LOOKING COOL was the real grind of the game?

And if we weren’t dropping real money – we’d be grinding gold in-game to buy gems, which has the EXACT same effect as adding a gear grind (making us spend more time in-game) but without the penalty of breaking the Ma
nifesto and making their core subscribers feel betrayed.

This is illogical and crazy. Hardcore grinders are never going to be the target audience for this game because it has NO SUB FEE. Spending more time in-game without spending money does Anet no good. The people they NEED are the cosmetics-kittens who would be spending money like gangbusters for housing, townclothes and the like.

For a game with this business model, vertical progression makes absolutely no sense as a development direction.

New costume sets FLEW out of COH’s cash shop. LOTRO’s cash shop is largely horses, cloaks and dresses – people will pay out the nose to LOOK cooler than other people. And yet NO more armor skins have been added to the store since launch, and the offerings were extremely skimpy to begin with. Anet cannot possibly be thinking that people are going to drop $100 a month just to play the Black Lion Key lottery, can they?"

I have a feeling that some of the things are hard in a very negative way. Let’s take Caudecus Manor for example. Mobs there are so hard it’s impossible to get through the dungeon with melee character without dying. The whole thing is it’s hard because mobs deal craploads of damage and it’s pretty much impossible to avoid it. Not much tactics is required to beat them, they dont have any intereseting mechanics that makes you think what would be the best and most efficient way to deal with them. All you need is brute strength. And that is a bit frustrating in my opinion.

“New costume sets FLEW out of COH’s cash shop. LOTRO’s cash shop is largely horses, cloaks and dresses – people will pay out the nose to LOOK cooler than other people. And yet NO more armor skins have been added to the store since launch, and the offerings were extremely skimpy to begin with. Anet cannot possibly be thinking that people are going to drop $100 a month just to play the Black Lion Key lottery, can they?”"

People spend thousands on star trek online for keys for rare ship drops. It’s pretty dumb.

I agree with some nerfing (Not AC kind of nerf, that dungeon is ridiculously easy now, but still challenging for newly lvl 30, which is kinda good) but CM is quite a jump from AC still.

I’d mostly say, a balance, and not a nerf. Dungeon should have a ramp of difficulty -Making CoF, CoE and Arah the hardest.

There are also some events that can one-shot players or NPCs, those need to be balanced too.

But! I still think things like the clocktower have to be kept. I enjoyed very much doing the clocktower, my heart pounded, my hand shake. But I enjoyed it. And it was a great achievment doing it. And that’s it. An achievment. It’s not content that needs to be completed. So it’s completely OK to be hard. (Same thing with mini dungeons/puzzles)

EDIT: Spelling typos

soulwblood.1529:

I agree with some nerfing (Not AC kind of nerf, that dungeon is ridiculously easy now, but still challenging for newly lvl 30, which is kinda good) but CM is quite a jump from AC still.

I’d mostly say, a balance, and not a nerf. Dungeon should have a ramp of difficulty -Making CoF, CoE and Arah the hardest.

There are also some events that can one-shot players or NPCs, those need to be balanced too.

But! I still think things like the clocktower have to be kept. I enjoyed very much doing the clocktower, my heart pounded, my hand shake. But I enjoyed it. And it was a great achievment doing it. And that’s it. An achievment. It’s not content that needs to be completed. So it’s completely OK to be hard. (Same thing with mini dungeons/puzzles)

EDIT: Spelling typos

Clocktower was epic. It was hard but in a very good way. I hope for even harder jumping puzzle. Josh Foreman said he is working on something hardcore

Smelly Bookah.6957:

I have a feeling that some of the things are hard in a very negative way. Let’s take Caudecus Manor for example. Mobs there are so hard it’s impossible to get through the dungeon with melee character without dying. The whole thing is it’s hard because mobs deal craploads of damage and it’s pretty much impossible to avoid it. Not much tactics is required to beat them, they dont have any intereseting mechanics that makes you think what would be the best and most efficient way to deal with them. All you need is brute strength. And that is a bit frustrating in my opinion.

I don’t want to offend you in any way, but this is the problem that people are discussing here. You are STATING something as if it was a fact, thus you are ignoring that this is your personal oppinion and that you possibly have limited information or might have missed something.
We completed all paths of CM multiple times without dying (sometimes with warrior/guardians only) and in fact the limited amount of vision is creating some very basic mechanics (line of sight in combination with ranged mobs) which most people don’t understand or realize that it even exists. I won’t deny that CM is hard compared to other dungeons, just because the trashmobs are a lot harder to deal with and i see that people might get frustrated by this.
Still – this is the kind of content i would like to see more! It gets easier if you know how to do it, still it is a challenge because you actually need to make good use of dodging, invulnerability and reflection skills.
Right now people are mostly avoiding this dungeon though because the armor doesn’t look that great (thats my personal oppinion obviously, but most people seem to share it^^) and the other rewards are just as good or even better (lodestone drops) in other dungeons.

Other than that… thumbs up from me as well for the clocktower
I did actually spend a good amount of time there and had a lot of fun! And i LOVED the part where you have to jump down again – it took me several tries until i figured that one out
But then again – once i completed it and knew the jumps, i tried it again with all my other characters and surprisingly made it within one or two tries with all of them (my norn and charr took some more tries actually :P). Thus the jumping itself can’t have been to difficult, but everyone who didn’t complete it had not the patience to “figure out” how to do the jumps and rather failed on the puzzle part.

I am well aware that i enjoy puzzles and challenges a lot more than other people do, but i don’t see a need for the creator to apologize since it was optional after all. One thing that may not have been optimal was the waiting time (plus the cutscene before the puzzle started). On one hand this made you actually try to not fail the puzzle because of this, but on the other hand it made this puzzle quite frustrating (due to “wasted” time) for people who tried it for hours and spent more time waiting than jumping. I would’ve loved the possibility to watch the other players who were still in the puzzle from down in the waiting zone (or from the top of the clocktower once you completed it)

Personally i would not mind some more really hard challenges in the game. For example give us minidungeons that actually require 20 people to group up, or just jumping puzzles with moving platforms that require timing, coordination between players and end with a challenging bossfight. It does not need to be easy – if you make it challenging enough that 0.1% of the players can complete it (and add small rewards along the way to that the rest still has fun and motivation), you could award the players who make it to the end with Lupicus tonics or some other unique and epic items (which do NOT necessarily have to be equipment).
Ideas for unique rewards can be emotes that get unlocked (like new,additional dancemoves), consumables that make your dodge rolls explode into a flash of colorful sparks, or useful things like speedpotions that speed you up by 50% (which exeeds the current speedcap) and end as soon as you enter combat, 25 slot bags, 100-500 gems or a babyquaggan minipet (and yes, this is useful!).

So please keep being creative and keep amazing us, ANET

Definitely agree with you grunblatt, the problem is that gamers today are so used to get everything handed to them, without the requirement to think for them self, that when they actually are forced to think, they rather spend 10 min writing a topic about it, than actually try to learn how to do it.

Let’s take Dark souls for an example, it’s claimed to be so incredibly difficult, while in reality it’s quite easy.

I’ve spent some time watching gameplay from dark souls because I wanted to know why “everyone” found it so hard.

And it just took one video or two to figure it all out: People Act before they think, even if they should do the opposite. And it’s not that they Act first and think after that’s the real problem, the problem is that they act – fail – act – fail.
They don’t take the time to consider how they could’ve done that encounter differently, they just try go in and spam the attack button again, until they get staggered and die.

If people just take the time to consider a tactic for a encounter, think of what they did wrong and how they could do it better, we would see much less whine from people who just want things handed to them.

you are right there, but keep in mind that challenging content is not for everyone. There are a lot of people who don’t have enough time to analyze hard bossmechanics, or who just don’t enjoy these things and just want to keep mashing buttons.
I don’t mind this at all (i only do if they start complaining ^^). Let’s just hope that ANET still realizes that there are people out here who enjoy those challenges. I don’t want the whole game to be difficult and challenging, but some places to go to if you are bored would be nice

Sure that’s true, would be nice if they made some HC Dungeons, created to test the skills of coordinated groups (Hopefully this new dungeon coming out is something like this, even thou I kind of doubt it)
Well guess I’ve to wait and see.

Cof has been buffed, and the Effigy boss seem to be back to his former self ^^

Wana thank Anet for making some of the content at least a bit more difficult, so Ty ANet.

Going to try some other dungeons today as well, hopefully most of them got buffed ^^

Looking forward to the new dungeon today as well

And once again TY anet for listening, even if you didn’t buff it because of this specific topic

Ok screw my last post, I just got back to the game after about 3weeks of not playing, went in to CoF path 2 just to see you completely nerfed the room before the final boss.

Loads of normal mobs with an occasional Veteran mob that’s constantly crippled? WTF?

Now this is just another mindless encounter were all I do is spam 1 for 3 min until I win. kitten you Anet.