Guild Wars 2

I hate Anet’s philosophy to make encounters frustrating and annoying instead of difficult. Why can’t we have difficult and fun instead of frustrating and not fun?

Mordalus.8146:

I hate Anet’s philosophy to make encounters frustrating and annoying instead of difficult. Why can’t we have difficult and fun instead of frustrating and not fun?

Can you elaborate? From what I’ve played of Twilight Assault, the instance basically tells you what to do and how to do it. Yes there is trial and error from time to time but there is a significant amount of visual and audio ques that hint if not hold up a giant flashing sign that something needs to be done in a specific fashion.

EDIT: and by that, it is fairly simple and IMHO not very difficult as long as your following along with what is being told.

sounds like its a bit too difficult for someone.

Mordalus.8146:

I hate Anet’s philosophy to make encounters frustrating and annoying instead of difficult. Why can’t we have difficult and fun instead of frustrating and not fun?

Because apparently frustrating and not fun is what the playerbase wanted, and we now suffer for it.

The oozes can be challenging, but they’re not too difficult with basic teamwork. You don’t even need specific gear or anything. Set one person each to kite the oozes and the other three pull the elementals and keep them from attacking the oozes. May take a few times and reflects do help if you have them, but any random group should be capable of this encounter if they’re willing to learn and work as a team.

the reality is little different, since Anet killed the classic trinity roles, and dungeons with no roles are huge fail,
they made artificial roles.

the ooze puller, the elemental kiter, the fast killer etc.

same in other encounters, you must have artificial tank… the guy who bring the ooze to the oil pond, instead of class skill taunt, you have the scent buff, which is basically a taunt…

same with the holopirates, you have to pull them to boss and kill them on it.. etc etc.

instead of the zerker all DPS mode, switch to roles mode, take some CC utilities and weapons, and youre good.

I personally have a big beef with Knock-spams. That’s not challenging. Being an Asura foot ball is just boring and dull to experience. |:

It’s a frustrating thing when there’s too many oozes.

Can it be done? Obviously.

Could it be more balanced and a bit more user friendly? Obviously.

Oozes are only hard if the party does not work together. With only five players, even most PUGs can coordinate on this. If you go in with a friend or two and make the rest from randoms, this can be pretty easy. A group used to each other would probably face-roll it :P

i’d love to know what people would see as difficult but yet not frustrating. So far people have complained about HP increases on mobs. They then complain about unique encounters like the oozes. How about making a recommendation instead of just whining? So far this new dungeon has had interesting mechanics and utilized good team play. Kudos to anet for it. If you are going to gripe be constructive and offer at least some examples of what you “wouldn’t” complain about.

On our first run, we did it on the second try and even got the no burn achievement for it.

Not wishing to sound elitist or anything like that but with a team that communicates, the ooze part is by no means difficult.

A bunch of randoms did it after 4 attempts during their first try. C’mon.

The point wasn’t ‘hard to do’, people are keen for challenge.
It’s ‘frustrating and unfun’.

For some reason ANet seems to think every dungeon needs a frustrating bit. Even CoF P1 has the annoying fireballs. (Which usually have a graphics bug where you can’t see the balls. Ahh the fun of randomly running and dieing over and over till you ‘guess’ the right time there not there.)

I honestly don’t think ANet understands the difference between something that is challenging and something that is frustrating.

They seem to think a Boss with twice as much HP is twice as difficult and that having abilities 1-shot you is difficult content.

But it’s not.

Equally they don’t comprehend that having an encounter like the Ooze thingy that isn’t challenging because of it’s mechanics, but rather because of some irritating design errors.

When players are spending a significant amount of time not actually dealing with your encounter mechanics but battling issues surrounding it (like getting Oozes to spawn without them being attacked by Eles) then that’s poor design.

CoF path 3 used to be like that. Get 5 people to stand in a specific place and pull a lever sounds simple enough…and it is with voice-com. But without voice-com it’s terribly stressful and frustrating and so for a long time people simply avoided that path.

Hate on Blizzard all you like but they had encounter design down to an art. Pacing, mechanics, fairness….they had it all right.

Went on a run the first night the dungeon was released with a pick up group (PUG) and when we got to the oozes and realized what you had to do, it took us two tries. Had two people on each side escorting and the other 3 were supporting by making sure the lava eles stayed off. Was very simple imo.

The boss with Sparky and the guy? was a pain in the *, but I believe that was because two of our teamates were not understanding the whole ooze concept.

We could kill sparky, but could only get the guy to 50 percent before the team starting going down hard.

So with more DPS it would had been gg.

A thought;

There’s a cute NPC trio in Brisban Wildlands, which are a tank/healer/DPS trinity between the Nightmare Court/Bandits/Inquest. The tank has a Taunt ability which forces the enemy to approach them, like a reverse Fear.

How many people here think that adding Taunt as an actual controlling condition, new abilities included, would be a good idea? One of the big things that these encounters need is the ability to immediately control an NPC’s movements, like the Oozes, and I’m wondering whether anyone else thinks that it might be a good niche in which to slot new utilities/weapon skills.

Sarrs.4831:

How many people here think that adding Taunt as an actual controlling condition, new abilities included, would be a good idea? One of the big things that these encounters need is the ability to immediately control an NPC’s movements, like the Oozes, and I’m wondering whether anyone else thinks that it might be a good niche in which to slot new utilities/weapon skills.

That’s a horrible idea. You can already control the oozes. It called “control”, one of the aspects of the GW2 trinity. We have tons of skills for that already. Immobilized, blind, cripple, interrupt, etc., you can get creative. With a taunt, it’s just exactly one button press to win.

I like that the oozes emphasize control actually, as contrasted by DPSing everything down like 99.999% of this game’s PVE. Hope ANet can filter through threads like this and realize that no matter what they do, a part of the players will always be up in arms about it.

Enigmus.3895:

i’d love to know what people would see as difficult but yet not frustrating. So far people have complained about HP increases on mobs. They then complain about unique encounters like the oozes. How about making a recommendation instead of just whining? So far this new dungeon has had interesting mechanics and utilized good team play. Kudos to anet for it. If you are going to gripe be constructive and offer at least some examples of what you “wouldn’t” complain about.

I agree.

People complain when content is made “hard” by adding enemies with a lot of health and/or who do a lot of damage but can be attacked any way you like.

But then they also complain when a fight or a section of a dungeon has specific mechanics that have to be used and the challenge is simply knowing what to do.

I don’t understand what the alternative is. They could make everything easy but people were complaining for months that there was no hard content in the game so I don’t think that would be a solution either and I’ve yet to see anyone actually explain what they would consider a hard but not frustrating/boring dungeon.

Mordalus.8146:

I hate Anet’s philosophy to make encounters frustrating and annoying instead of difficult. Why can’t we have difficult and fun instead of frustrating and not fun?

Idk, i had fun with the entire path (save final boss) and i found parts of it to be difficult in the proper way ie having to learn from queues, anticipate abilities, respond quickly, control group movement to mitigate abilities, use support healing and blinds, do LoS pulls

Frustration is an internal quality; something that happens to your mentality irrespective of difficulty. You get frustrated when you don’t get what you want. Maybe deal with your emotions better?

Danikat.8537:

Enigmus.3895:

i’d love to know what people would see as difficult but yet not frustrating. So far people have complained about HP increases on mobs. They then complain about unique encounters like the oozes. How about making a recommendation instead of just whining? So far this new dungeon has had interesting mechanics and utilized good team play. Kudos to anet for it. If you are going to gripe be constructive and offer at least some examples of what you “wouldn’t” complain about.

I agree.

People complain when content is made “hard” by adding enemies with a lot of health and/or who do a lot of damage but can be attacked any way you like.

But then they also complain when a fight or a section of a dungeon has specific mechanics that have to be used and the challenge is simply knowing what to do.

Adding a lot of health and OHKO moves isn’t a good way to make content hard. Look at the fights in games with good bosses, such as Devil May Cry 3/4 or Dark Souls. They don’t force you into using any mechanics or OHKO you constantly, nor do they have a lot of health. You can attack in any way you like. Still, the bosses are challenging, because they have interesting mechanics that are rarely annoying.

We’re not supposed to design encounters for ANet. We’re not designers. However, I can see when a boss is interesting and when it’s not. The bosses of Dark Souls are interesting. GW2’s aren’t.

Jamais vu.5284:

I like that the oozes emphasize control actually, as contrasted by DPSing everything down like 99.999% of this game’s PVE. Hope ANet can filter through threads like this and realize that no matter what they do, a part of the players will always be up in arms about it.

I thought that this dungeon as a whole was pretty fantastic on the control front, actually, not just the oozes; the hologram explosions are a consistent mechanic that demand it, and how well you can control them more or less dictates your success in the last fight.

dekou.6012:

We’re not supposed to design encounters for ANet. We’re not designers. However, I can see when a boss is interesting and when it’s not. The bosses of Dark Souls are interesting. GW2’s aren’t.

That’s not a very fair comparison simply from the fact that in those games, the Bosses fight ONE PC with a limited set of mechanics (ok Dark Souls has quite a few….but still limited to one PC) where an ANet boss has to compensate for possibly fighting SIX different classes that each have a multitude of possible mechanics and then there could be DOZENS of PCs fighting (OR just ONE).

I’m not saying what you state isn’t true, just that I’m not sure it’s even possible to make a Boss that is “intersting” and challenging for all the possible classes/builds that could exist in a GW2 encounter. I’m guessing this has been tried, whined about by players, changed in-game (to a non-interesting form) and the team may have just decided it’s a waste of resources that could be directed somewhere else.

Or you know, you could do it the easy way?

when you get to the room have your 2 tankiest run in(1 on each path) before spaki lights the fires. After the elementals spawn the 2 beefy people should be able to agro and pull the eles to the end by the gears and kite while 2 of the 3 renaming group members freely kite the ooze with no issue.

Used this method every time and finished in 1 pull with pugs and guildies alike. It works.

SiLENT.2346:

Or you know, you could do it the easy way?

when you get to the room have your 2 tankiest run in(1 on each path) before spaki lights the fires. After the elementals spawn the 2 beefy people should be able to agro and pull the eles to the end by the gears and kite while 2 of the 3 renaming group members freely kite the ooze with no issue.

Used this method every time and finished in 1 pull with pugs and guildies alike. It works.

Our group had a very similar strategy, but when oozes would get to 60% there eles would suddenly aggro oozes, so what we did was this – have 3 people run in, pull all eles to the door and slowly start DPSing. When all eles reach 10% those 3 people start kiting and 2 remaining people start pulling the oozes. When oozes reach half way there those 3 kiters pull all eles and burst them. There’s about 10 second gap before they start respawning, so ooze pullers can calmly finish their journey

Mordalus.8146:

I hate Anet’s philosophy to make encounters frustrating and annoying instead of difficult. Why can’t we have difficult and fun instead of frustrating and not fun?

When you learn how to play the content, it’s not frustrating or difficult.

No. It just gets tedious then. But what would I know?

Having pugged this dungeon successfully several times now I can safely say that the oozes need to be changed. When the most frustrating part of a dungeon is the very first puzzle something is off. I love the dungeon and the boss fights but the ooze event just isn’t fun since you’re forced to rely on the sometimes unpredictable AI.

Fungalfoot.7213:

Having pugged this dungeon successfully several times now I can safely say that the oozes need to be changed. When the most frustrating part of a dungeon is the very first puzzle something is off. I love the dungeon and the boss fights but the ooze event just isn’t fun since you’re forced to rely on the sometimes unpredictable AI.

look at my previous post. There’s nothing unpredictable about it.

Mordalus.8146:

I hate Anet’s philosophy to make encounters frustrating and annoying instead of difficult. Why can’t we have difficult and fun instead of frustrating and not fun?

I’m just curious as to what OP means here. Usually if something is difficult it can lead to frustration if you let it get the better of you emotionally.

Anet tried something different and it seems that the difficulty is relative, some find it quick and easy others say it’s hard and daunting, I lean more in the way if it not being that hard to do.

It’s just new and different but there’s probably videos on youtube that can show you how to do it quickly.

Sometimes i think people just want to enter a dungeon and wait for a chest full of rares to spawn every 30 min.

I think the OP wants a boss with 1million HP to hit for 10 minutes.

Dark Souls is an awful example of what non frustrating content looks like. That game is full of cheap shots and on-purpose annoying enemy placement. Next you are going to tell me you think “I Wanna Be The Guy” is totally fair and thats how you like games.

Jamais vu.5284:

Sarrs.4831:

How many people here think that adding Taunt as an actual controlling condition, new abilities included, would be a good idea? One of the big things that these encounters need is the ability to immediately control an NPC’s movements, like the Oozes, and I’m wondering whether anyone else thinks that it might be a good niche in which to slot new utilities/weapon skills.

That’s a horrible idea. You can already control the oozes. It called “control”, one of the aspects of the GW2 trinity. We have tons of skills for that already. Immobilized, blind, cripple, interrupt, etc., you can get creative. With a taunt, it’s just exactly one button press to win.

I like that the oozes emphasize control actually, as contrasted by DPSing everything down like 99.999% of this game’s PVE. Hope ANet can filter through threads like this and realize that no matter what they do, a part of the players will always be up in arms about it.

Haven’t actually tried doing it that way yet but how would DPSing everything down not work here? If you have enough DPS to burn down the elemental this part should be a breeze.

Seriously , seriously, seriously guys…..

This dungeon path is only hard if you are not doing what the dungeon asks for.

Obviously if you aren’t going to kill holograms near a generator , you aren’t going to complete the dungeon. So why is the concept and scenario of oozes any different? Because you have to rely on your teammates? Is it so hard to cooperate with your team????

Maybe Anet should make more solo dungeons….. This way we don’t have to rely on the “baddies”.

Mirta.5029:

look at my previous post. There’s nothing unpredictable about it.

I’ve personally observed the oozes following people without the buff rather than the people with it so I’m going to have to call bull on that. The fact that they retain their usual aggro mechanics means that things don’t always jive. The AI is known for being sluggish and the oozes are no exception. Sometimes they don’t pick up on the buff as quickly as they should.

Fungalfoot.7213:

Mirta.5029:

look at my previous post. There’s nothing unpredictable about it.

I’ve personally observed the oozes following people without the buff rather than the people with it so I’m going to have to call bull on that. The fact that they retain their usual aggro mechanics means that things don’t always jive. The AI is known for being sluggish and the oozes are no exception. Sometimes they don’t pick up on the buff as quickly as they should.

I did not experience this problem at all. Had a lot of bugs happen to me at the last boss, but not on Oozes O_o you should probably report that.
That or did the person with the perfume on run away somewhere else? They stop following you if you’re too far away.

Mirta.5029:

I did not experience this problem at all. Had a lot of bugs happen to me at the last boss, but not on Oozes O_o you should probably report that.
That or did the person with the perfume on run away somewhere else? They stop following you if you’re too far away.

The AI has been this way since day one with it sometimes just zoning out. Just ask any ranger or minion master how reliable the AI truly is. Sometimes when taking the buff I haven’t been able to get the ooze to follow me at all. This usually fixes itself but it’s still annoying when you have to time it right.

That said, the point here is that your success should never depend on the AI. There’s a reason why escort quests are so loathed and this somehow manages to make it all the worse by having you escort a hostile AI. The event isn’t fun and it ought to be revisted because right now it sours an otherwise great dungeon experience.

Understood what to do in this part in like 1 min by looking at the room and the hint above, plus the name of the mob…took 3-4 tries at first run to get that pulls and knocks worked so well on the fire elemental and that we had to pull them in synchro.
Mobs and AI aren’t that buggy, always worked perfectly fine for me and i did it 8-10 or more times i believe.
This part of the dungeon isn’t much skillbased or what, it’s just teamwork based…much like the new tequatal…
I just hope they don’t nerf this dungeon because people will nag about their own lack of skill and teamwork. (never had problems with the ooze not following me not even once)

To be honest, I’m surprised to see that so many people found the part with the oozes to be easy. Last night I was in a party with two friends and two randoms, so three of us at least knew each other well, and the two others were great about communicating and helping, and even with such a good group, we were stuck at this part for almost half an hour before just giving up. It was a real bummer.

We tried everything we could think of, and would get close, but never succeeded, even with a player who’d been through the path before. I expect dungeons to be challenging, but this part feels like it has more to do with luck, especially with all the coordinating we were doing and still failing.

I think that if they just made the oozes green enemies, so that they didn’t aggro any player who gets too close and don’t get hit by aoe abilities, this section would be much more do-able. But I can see why some might find that this would make it too easy.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Mordalus.8146:

I hate Anet’s philosophy to make encounters frustrating and annoying instead of difficult. Why can’t we have difficult and fun instead of frustrating and not fun?

When you learn how to play the content, it’s not frustrating or difficult.

It will be if you’re low on dps. Everything went fine with regular amount of dps or more, but if one player is below average, it will be hard during the 1st boss. (hard then on not kitten, come on)

How about you change your tactics, instead of brute forcing it? Equip a hammer, mace, shield, stomp, kick,… and just make the way for oozes.

Oozes are immune to CC, elementals are not, they have plenty of HP to toss around, and once you kick them far enough from ooze they will attack players instead of oozes.

Really, adept to the fight, use your wide variety of skills and weapons.

God, people playing gw2 really forgot everything about how dungeons work…

Lighthammer.3280:

How about you change your tactics, instead of brute forcing it? Equip a hammer, mace, shield, stomp, kick,… and just make the way for oozes.

Oozes are immune to CC, elementals are not, they have plenty of HP to toss around, and once you kick them far enough from ooze they will attack players instead of oozes.

Really, adept to the fight, use your wide variety of skills and weapons.

God, people playing gw2 really forgot everything about how dungeons work…

I think most of the people complaining don’t actually do dungeons they are the LS crowd (meaning they mostly do open world PVE) that got pulled into a dungeon.

MastaNeenja.1537:

I think most of the people complaining don’t actually do dungeons they are the LS crowd (meaning they mostly do open world PVE) that got pulled into a dungeon.

This. Rather bad planning to have a hard dungeon be featured as the new thing to do for people who may not even be into dungeons.

This thread isn’t fair to ANet, honestly. It’s one thing to challenge the legitimacy of difficulty when a boss is an HP box with one-hitters. That’s artificial difficulty. But calling out the challenge of the fight because your group doesn’t coordinate? Get real man, the dungeon isn’t even long. I wonder how many people completely ignore Caithe’s explanations of every single encounter.

Nilkemia.8507:

MastaNeenja.1537:

I think most of the people complaining don’t actually do dungeons they are the LS crowd (meaning they mostly do open world PVE) that got pulled into a dungeon.

This. Rather bad planning to have a hard dungeon be featured as the new thing to do for people who may not even be into dungeons.

I want them to keep making dungeons but I’d rather they keep the LS aspect out I don’t like Scarlet in my dungeons really. Unfortunately LS is the vehicle they chose to introduce new … content. So i was just a dungeon guy minding my own business when this happened.

I think they did a good job with the dungeon none the less.

Blah blah swampfractal blah blah oozepuzzle

Because any mechanic that doesn’t involve hitting everything you can as hard as you can is “frustrating” and “unfun” amirite?

Despite the fact that such mechanics require far more coordination and team effort than the fights people complain about being “boring”

I’ll go ahead and say it

Dungeons should never be designed around easy PUGs. PUGs should step up to the dungeon, the dungeon shouldn’t lower itself to a PUG-waltz.

In GW1 pretty much the whole game was a series of dungeons (instanced encounters with mechanics that you needed to know, built for small groups of players) and people figured out how to PUG stuff, even hard mode stuff, without that stuff being made easier.

This is not GW1 be a long shot, but the sentiment that hard content should exist, that content should only ever gate people out of it by virtue of player skill is still very much alive. You don’t need to grind gear to experience anything the game has to offer (though if you like grinding gear, fractals have several additional difficulty levels) and you’re never going to need to farm raid 1 to try raid 2 and so on.

All that stands between your group and completing anything in the entire game is your group… so why shouldn’t those actions be a decent challenge?

PopeUrban.2578:

Blah blah swampfractal blah blah oozepuzzle

Because any mechanic that doesn’t involve hitting everything you can as hard as you can is “frustrating” and “unfun” amirite?

Despite the fact that such mechanics require far more coordination and team effort than the fights people complain about being “boring”

I’ll go ahead and say it

Dungeons should never be designed around easy PUGs. PUGs should step up to the dungeon, the dungeon shouldn’t lower itself to a PUG-waltz.

In GW1 pretty much the whole game was a series of dungeons (instanced encounters with mechanics that you needed to know, built for small groups of players) and people figured out how to PUG stuff, even hard mode stuff, without that stuff being made easier.

This is not GW1 be a long shot, but the sentiment that hard content should exist, that content should only ever gate people out of it by virtue of player skill is still very much alive. You don’t need to grind gear to experience anything the game has to offer (though if you like grinding gear, fractals have several additional difficulty levels) and you’re never going to need to farm raid 1 to try raid 2 and so on.

All that stands between your group and completing anything in the entire game is your group… so why shouldn’t those actions be a decent challenge?

This is what happens when a whole generation is brought up with participation trophies and the concept of no losers. Defeat builds character. The first step is to accept it with grace.

MastaNeenja.1537:

This is what happens when a whole generation is brought up with participation trophies and the concept of no losers. Defeat builds character. The first step is to accept it with grace.

Pretty much.
Life isn’t all rainbows and puppies, and we should be glad it isn’t. Tasting defeat only makes victory sweeter.

Some types with the oozes: you dont need to kill the elementals.
Use reflect, pull and knockback skills. If dont, use stuns.
Dont let the oozes touch the fire.
Began it at the same time.

Toke me 8 mins with my guildies to figure it out and execute it, because 1 didnt read for like 6 min and was killing the oozes (he was semiafk lol).

I did it with pugs in less than 5 minutes (sham fully been with the feromones from the plants, predicting the trayectory of the norn brea – alquitran- wasnt enough to them to pass the first bosses, they manage to kill the ooze, the other mesmer was too slow with the feromones and he got the agro in the second attempt- and my comeback when he downed wasnt enough and lately they entered without all respawning -.-. After that they slowly quitted…)

Has anyone found anything in the new path that actively favors classes other than warrior/guardian/mesmer? I play a mesmer myself and several times I felt like I was carrying the group through spamming gimmicky mechanics. Oozes: spam all cc and reflect sword/focus has to offer and then some. Slick: complete faceroll after Sparky dies, could tell the group to sit back and just smack him as nothing would go through 3 iWardens. Final boss we all messed up badly time and time again, but I personally saved us even on the successful attempt: focus pull holo into boss, leap, frenzy both of them while standing INSIDE! the boss. Repeat until thief has revived the others, then pray I don’t bugport into a cog again.

Now I don’t mean to brag, in fact I felt terrible because all of these fancy gimmicks are limited to 1-2 classes each. At no point did I think “man, wish I had a ranger” or “a good condi necro could really wreck those guys”. At least Scorpion Wire proved rather helpful, which it hadn’t since cheesing the T4 candidate trials.