Guild Wars 2

I know that the recent patch change kholer, and while some people say it’s a great change that varies the fight, for me, and in my experience, people are more adamant to skip him than take him on.

That leads us to believe that the intended thoughts on making Kholer a better and less “skippable” fight are in fact a failure on ANet’s part. it’s not impossible to do – I like the ghostbuster themed fight at the end of one of those path and think it was a great change that varied the fight and, although it can’t be skippable, it gave more emphasis on the ghost traps (previously turrets) and stop the fight from being like all others where you basically follow and auto-attack.

I’m not saying Kholer has to be buffed or nerfed, but I personally thought that Kholer summoning more mobs over certain phases was a pretty sub-standard idea. Adds nothing to the fight apart from annoyance, irritation and “oh look…more Ascalon rangers/monks/necros/elementalists”

Anyway…what are your opinions and experience with Kholer, and what do you think could be changed to actually make people want to take him on?

Seems that Anet saw that, sometimes a party or two would kill Kholer for the waypoint and for the 15s it gives, and they fixed it. Now, no one except the occasional, one in a million strange guild party does.
Poor boss mechanics, poor boss mechanics everywhere. But then again, when I want that epic boss fight, where you have to solve puzzles and/or activate traps to kill a boss, I just play a single player game, or Monster Hunter 2G on the PSP

You want to make Kholer interesting? Here’s how you have to do it.
-Kholer now is unskippable.
-Kholer spawns invulnerable adds at 75% 50% and 25%. The adds can only be killed by hitting them with an Ancient Ascalonian Hammer. The hammers are situated in the archives after the “fire corridor”. 1 hit banishes the ghost.
2 or 3 players hold aggro and “deal with Kholer” the other 2 go get the hammers.
FUN

Do we have to do everything in this game?
And if we have to do it, then give us the possibility to do it. Let us make dungeons.

What about the people that want to do speed clears? Forcing people to fight Kholer doesn’t seem optimal. Leaving it up to choice allows a group to fight him if they want, or skip him if they want. If you are in a PUG group, discuss it before you go into the dungeon. It isn’t a failure on Anet’s part if people skip Kholer and the encounter is designed to where that is able to happen. If it’s a failure on anyone’s part, it’s due to lack of communication or not taking initiative to lay out what you are going to do before the dungeon starts.

It’s the other way around with most groups I run in, once in a blue moon do people skip Kholer. He has gotten significantly easier, deal w/ the adds as soon as they pop up, (usual P2 kill order) and then back on Kholer.

TheMaskedParadigm.3629:

What about the people that want to do speed clears? Forcing people to fight Kholer doesn’t seem optimal. Leaving it up to choice allows a group to fight him if they want, or skip him if they want. If you are in a PUG group, discuss it before you go into the dungeon. It isn’t a failure on Anet’s part if people skip Kholer and the encounter is designed to where that is able to happen. If it’s a failure on anyone’s part, it’s due to lack of communication or not taking initiative to lay out what you are going to do before the dungeon starts.

Yes, that’s a way of seeing things.

But I see it as an Anet failure in this case.
Content should not be skipped. The possibility should not exist. Speed clears are an abomination, and in my view it’s ruining the game. In my view a speed clear is when all the team members are so good at playing their class and coordinate in such a fashion that can clear a 40 minute dungeon in 20 minutes without skipping anything. If stuff can be skipped, then why did people work on designing it. Choices are fun yes, but there are well implemented choices, and bad implemented choices. If the ability to “speed clear” , as you call it, wasn’t there from the start, people would not kitten so much about it..
“but, but, but, I want my rewards by doing almost nothing. I want to play with only one hand and watch some tv, and still get all my rewards”. You want your shiny stuff? Then do (fun) stuff for it. (obviously revamping trash mobs is included in my statements)

Levistis.8356:

It’s the other way around with most groups I run in, once in a blue moon do people skip Kholer. He has gotten significantly easier, deal w/ the adds as soon as they pop up, (usual P2 kill order) and then back on Kholer.

If this is true, then great job, I haven’t ran a pug in ages.

most of the people who used to do AC before the update is now skipping the whole dungeon. says a lot about the update.

Black Wolf.7348:

most of the people who used to do AC before the update is now skipping the whole dungeon. says a lot about the update.

No it doesn’t.

Did all three paths the other day. One death the entire time and did kholer on all three paths. Not everyone was 80 btw.

This still says nothing about the update.

WonderfulCT.6278:

Black Wolf.7348:

most of the people who used to do AC before the update is now skipping the whole dungeon. says a lot about the update.

No it doesn’t.

Did all three paths the other day. One death the entire time and did kholer on all three paths. Not everyone was 80 btw.

This still says nothing about the update.

I can only speak for my own personal example, but I saw much less reluctance to do Kholer pre patch.
I have killed him since the new patch, but only once. And after doing it on one path, we all agreed we’d not be bothered to do it on the other path. Just felt pointless doing it when we could skip it and there not be much of a difference.
Then other runs have just consisted of:

“Skip?”
“Y”
“yes, pls”
“yes”
“yeah”

Fasalina.6571:

Seems that Anet saw that, sometimes a party or two would kill Kholer for the waypoint and for the 15s it gives, and they fixed it. Now, no one except the occasional, one in a million strange guild party does.
Poor boss mechanics, poor boss mechanics everywhere. But then again, when I want that epic boss fight, where you have to solve puzzles and/or activate traps to kill a boss, I just play a single player game, or Monster Hunter 2G on the PSP

You want to make Kholer interesting? Here’s how you have to do it.
-Kholer now is unskippable.
-Kholer spawns invulnerable adds at 75% 50% and 25%. The adds can only be killed by hitting them with an Ancient Ascalonian Hammer. The hammers are situated in the archives after the “fire corridor”. 1 hit banishes the ghost.
2 or 3 players hold aggro and “deal with Kholer” the other 2 go get the hammers.
FUN

Do we have to do everything in this game?
And if we have to do it, then give us the possibility to do it. Let us make dungeons.

I hate your proposal. The original Kholer was fine, it was only skipped because people failed at dodging. Make is a mandatory fight and people would simply learn to do it. It was never hard, it just had a tell and response people had to learn. Because AC saw so much traffic and had the largest number of dungeon noobs doing it, this encounter has a failure rate higher than others because the quality of players completing it was generally lower and unlike a lot of other fights, it forced you to do something to respond to it’s mechanic.

I also agree that the changes made to AC encourage more people to pass on running AC. In the past it was a fun and rewarding three path run with pugs, now it’s like all other dungeons, one harder path (three, depending on party composition – this is a design failure) one hard path (two, depending on party communication and mastery and a foreign game design element) and one easy path (one, it’s basically the same). I don’t run AC any more and I dearly miss the days when I could spend two hours running all three paths on any of my characters with a PuG.

Since the patch that gave guaranteed silvers drop with good chance of Wondrous Bag, Kholer is fought much more often. Myself included.

That being said, I find it is totally acceptable that he is skipped for those who are only interested in tokens (and find that the 3 tokens he drops is not worth the trouble). The latest patch made Spider Queen compulsory but still allowed Troll/Kholer to be skipped. Yes, content is there but it doesn’t mean that everything have to be killed. You can’t expect everyone to run dungeons for the same reason as you.