Guild Wars 2

I finally had the chance to play the new TA path last night for the first time, and I have to say that it’s awesome.

It takes the positional and “puzzle” mechanics that were so good in the Molten Facility and puts them in a permanent path.

Some of the mechanics actually reward specs other than pure DPS.

It’s challenging, but moves fast enough that it is not tedious.

The path is just about the perfect length.

Well done.

PS: The optional items at the end are an interesting touch. There are rooms in other dungeons that look like they were intended as jumping puzzles and lots of areas for exploration. One example is the sarcophagus room at the end of CoF p2. Could we possibly see these active soon? That’d be really cool. Think along the lines of Light of Deldrimor!

Yep, the dungeon, the difficulty. Love everything about it and it’s well made.
Too bad I will never go back to doing it again as I have all the achievements and the difficulty / time required doesn’t remotely justify the end reward.

Such a shame.

Something like a “dungeon team” doesn’t exist.

Acerola.6407:

Something like a “dungeon team” doesn’t exist.

Sure it does. I doubt the path coded itself.

They formed a group of designers to create this dungeon. Those were people from the MF-Dungeon and the Aetherblade-Dungeon combined.

Thus, no real dungeon team … just your random LS-Team

So they PUGed (merged parties) to design the dungeon? Oh, the irony XD

While I’ll admit that most of the dungeon is well designed, I will say that there are a couple things that could use some improvement.

I think that the oozes in the ooze room could just just a tad bit more health. Many classes have cleave on their weapons, making it hard for the ooze to survive if you can’t pull the elementals away. And before you say that you should pull them away/reflect the attacks I feel I must point out that only a couple classes have targeted pulls and only a couple classes have reflect/block fields. Yes it’s still achievable and yes it’s meant to require teamwork, but the gap between groups that have said classes in them and groups that do not is a bit too large. Just giving a bit more health (not a lot, just a small amount) to the oozes should make this room a lot better.

And then there is the Clockheart. Overall pretty well designed again, but there are three seperate things in this fight I found to be badly thought out. For one, the teleport on the holo machines. This one, thankfully, has been acknowledged by the design team and will be fixed in the next major patch.

The second is the sprocket/gear attack. I understand that it’s supposed to push us to melee. It does a good job of that. Too good, unfortunately. I don’t think it should ever target downed/dead players. In that fight if you go down and the boss moves, you’re most likely out for the remainder of battle as those sprockets will still target you and assure you are dead instead of downed. Then they will keep being thrown at anyone trying to rez you.

And the last is the super attack. When the Clockheart still has a lot of health I feel that the damage and knockback it does is acceptable. If his health is low, though, and he pulls it off it will take most professions from full health to dead in one or two of the hits. Yes, I understand that it’s supposed to be punishing to not remove the shield. But so punishing that it kills the entire party unless they’re invulned (few classes have an invuln that will last long enough) and forces a full fight reset? That’s a bit much. No other fight in the game has such a devastating attack.

Outside of those small issues, though, it is a well designed dungeon. Hopefully they’ll keep the rewards high enough to keep people doing it, because if they don’t then the good design will be seemingly wasted.

Sorry! I just do not agree. This was a revamp of an existing dungeon that no one was doing and in a few days it will be just as empty. All the dungeons are empty and you can put all the spin on them you want but it won’t make them any fuller.

Who?

Acerola.6407:

They formed a group of designers to create this dungeon. Those were people from the MF-Dungeon and the Aetherblade-Dungeon combined.

Thus, no real dungeon team … just your random LS-Team

Ah, so you ARE being a semantics troll.

The title of the thread was just saying “well done” to the people who created the new dungeon path, as I’m sure you are well aware. I couldn’t care less where they pulled the people from. For this LS, they were a dungeon team, as it was a team of people and they were tasked with creating a dungeon path.

This is a very well designed dungeon. If you run with a group with not enough DPS or toughness you will have a very hard time espeically with Slick and Sparki.

Ooze – nicely done. You can actually do a few practice run for the mechanics with newbies. People understand it quickly and it is actually fun. Even not very tanky builds are able to hold the lava elementals long enough. Good balance.

Slick and Spark. This is a bit over the top. I had once group that wiped over and over again as we couldn’t do enough DPS and people were to often on their back. It is very hard to get up here on yourself. Probably this one just needs 10% less HP and it perfect.

Foreman Spur – easy one if you do not panic and just watch your steps. Even if one or two people die you can finish it or revive them. Having no problem with this one. Fully puggable.

Ground Achievement Room – sole reason it is there for the achivement. Which is a pain to get. A time based counter would have been better (read: group effort istead of ego). Thumbs down here. Only there, so people replay it as this is a really horrible achievement.

Security Room – very nice. Easy to understand mechanics and fully puggable. People can get up on their own or being revived. Very pug friendly. You don’t get wiped than often even on the first try. So learning curve is just right.

Clockheard Fight – again very pug friendly little bit harder but again people can get up or getting revived. But the camera bugs here a lot. Sometime it turns by 180 degree which is very annoying and you get rubber banded when running into the destroyed generators. This needs some polish on the technical side.

Addional Bonus Content – Doesn’t list that you have to go to the Security Room with Caithe. Missed out on this one on several runs until I checked the forums. Need to be patchd to add this as well. Also the chest achievement sucks, as it is ego content again as you have to open five chests yourself. Probably there for the sole purpose, so people run the dungeon more often and fight over who open the chests. Not a good design.

All in all a very well made dungeon and way better than others. Especially because there is no skipping/rushing possible here or tons of trash mobs.

But it needs some polish!

I hope over the next year some other paths gets overhauld and some replaced. Love the no skipping, so save point design, so you actually have to play it instead of bugging your way through.

Kudos to the team that designed it. Now re-do all other dungeons and I will become a dungeon runner and quit WvW!

WilliamDaBloody.2591:

Love the no skipping, so save point design, so you actually have to play it instead of bugging your way through.

This is one of the reasons I love the aetherblade twilight path, you can not just simply stealth or bug/exploit your way around the enemies to avoid fighting them. (to be honest I never really understood most of the dungeon mob skipping anyway, as your group could take out most of those mobs in under 30 seconds. While all it takes is one person to mess up on the skipping and all that “time” you “saved” is lost). No demands for a Theif to Shadow Refuge, no demand for a Mesmer to portal, and no demand to be able to know to secret way to jump up a cliff and around the mobs.

Acerola.6407:

Something like a “dungeon team” doesn’t exist.

Indeed, there hasn’t been a proper dungeon team for months. Devs haven’t bothered at all to reply to the numerous threads on the Dungeons forum – only the TA one. The result after a year: nothing was fixed, but simply removed, and we got just one new path focusing on Living Random Story.

I truly hope they hire more people for development the real game and waste less resources on LS.

Myst Dawnbringer.9138:

Sorry! I just do not agree. This was a revamp of an existing dungeon that no one was doing and in a few days it will be just as empty. All the dungeons are empty and you can put all the spin on them you want but it won’t make them any fuller.

Good of you to let us know. You see, when I do my daily bunch of dungeon runs with a bunch of other people, we never noticed that nobody was actually doing dungeons. I guess all those people on the lfg tool are non existent too? And yes, my daily dungeon runs do include the old TA paths as well, and I miss the fw up path too. If you stand in front of the dungeon entrance and lfg in map chat, well, of course you’ll think they are empty..