Guild Wars 2

Let me just start out by saying that, overall, I really enjoy and love this game. So out of my love for this game I’m going to say what I’m about to say with the hope that Anet will see and understand the case that I am trying to make, and eventually change either the difficulty or the design of the fight.

I wont sugar coat this: the basis of the entire design of the Magg bomb defend encounter defines absolutely everything about the phrase “I’d rather be flogged to death with rusty barbed wire.”

The mobs spawn too fast to kill, and the fact that the majority of the mobs are ranged makes kiting only plausible for so long until death is all but unavoidable. So in the end the only remotely feasible way for the average group of pugs, regardless of gear, and trait build to successfully complete this encounter is by rotating deaths and running back fast enough to get there before the other people in the group die. Even this strategy involves a little bit of luck to even work. All this not to mention after finally successfully completing this encounter, the 20 or so silver reward you get for completing the dungeon barely covers the repair bill you potentially wrack up.

So, essentially what I am trying to point out in this post is that this encounter is the least amount of fun I have ever had in this entire game, and in fact is nothing but a source of frustration to me. I dont mind difficult encounters, but the type of difficulty presented by this encounter is just inexcusably terrible in terms of design. Any encounter that demands the death of every player in the group at least once and others two or three times is just the epitome of poor design.

I agree. I won’t say poor design. I just think that it is hard to understand the intention of what is supposed to happen here. I could have understood if it were something similar to path 1, where there are Elites mixed with Normal mobs, but that is not the case. I am interested to see replies to this is far as maybe other strategies people have tried that isn’t kiting and dying rotations.

I would rather fight Zhaitan with a wet noodle than do the Magg path one more time.

We ran in with our group and started kiting right away with no cc available. In the end it turned into all of us dying one at a time and running straight back. Burning some survival cooldowns and running again. After 3 or so deaths the event was at 100%.

Wasn’t the most interesting event, but cant say it’s hard either. Would be a bit more fun if there weren’t 3 ranged adds there nuking everyone down.

Rightnow.4031:

I dont mind difficult encounters, but the type of difficulty presented by this encounter is just inexcusably terrible in terms of design. Any encounter that demands the death of every player in the group at least once and others two or three times is just the epitome of poor design.

Maybe that is not the actual design?

I strongly recommend people to actually use some consumables and try to complete the encounter the proper way, the difference food/potions makes is night and day.

I agree that event needs fixing. It’s absolutely, 100% un-fun. I have seen groups get into arguments and nearly break apart over how to handle this fight. I’ve once been in a group that successfully did all-in. Every other group insists on corpse-runs rotating who’s in the room kiting. It’s absolutely awful that the majority of players feel that this really really un-fun strategy is needed, and feels opposite to what a well-designed encounter should be.

Additionally, to who pointed out specific class party combinations to pass this encounter, that defeats the stated purpose of the game that you do not need specific class groupings to clear dungeons (and that each class can fill each role). As a Mesmer, corpse running in that room is awful. I have a lot of powerful evasion abilities, yes, but with so many charr in the room it does little good as they get blown in quick succession and all go on cooldown. Consider the final boss fights in paths one and three. Both of them have bosses with very powerful attacks, but I can ration out evasion/block/immunity to deal with them. With 50 charr, that doesn’t work so well.

Tl:Dr: This encounter is simply un-fun the way it’s designed, and once I have what I need for my armor, I will never set foot in path 2 again until it’s changed.

Try it again with a group of 75s Kevin.2176

vicwolf.7862:

Try it again with a group of 75s Kevin.2176

Are you serious? do you actually go around to find people that are barely the level requirement for the exploration modes and attempt to complete them?

We did actually try this encounter again, just to see how difficult this encounter is when you are extremely undergeared.

We tried with no armor slot pieces at all, just weapons and jewelry. To give you an idea this is actually lower total stats than having full blues in every single slot, you also have 0 defense. Here is the result.

Kevin.2176:

vicwolf.7862:

Try it again with a group of 75s Kevin.2176

Are you serious? do you actually go around to find people that are barely the level requirement for the exploration modes and attempt to complete them?

We did actually try this encounter again, just to see how difficult this encounter is when you are extremely undergeared.

We tried with no armor slot pieces at all, just weapons and jewelry. To give you an idea this is actually lower total stats than having full blues in every single slot, you also have 0 defense. Here is the result.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlvDwO3WwGE

This doesn’t prove anything. Perfect setup ( c’mon, guardian alone can tank it to 40% – you have 2 guardians and a warrior), class knowledge, ppl u know and play with, voice communication doesn’t compare AT ALL to a random pug group of carebears. And technically at 70% u were already screwed.

Perfect setup? the fact that you mentioned setup really makes me hesitate to continue reading your post.

Do you understand what 0 armor means? This means you have no defense from gear at all (not counting the massive stats loss), you won’t be able to take more than 2 full auto-attacks from 1 single mob. Pay attention to the HP bar movement, so you will have some idea how fast a guardian can “tank” with no armor.

Technically speaking a “random pug group of care bears” shouldn’t be able to clear anything under Anet’s stated design philosophy. As exploration modes are tailored towards organized groups. If this is the direction that you want the game to be heading, aka any random pug group of carebears with no class knowledge and 0 communication should just walk in and 1 shot, then I guess you are correct that this encounter is overtuned.

Agree with Kevin – pugs should not be able to clear explorable dungeons.

But I also agree with some other posters – this event should be changed. However for other reason that ppl here stated – pugs should NOT be able to succesfully complete the event by kiting/dying.

There’s no such thing as 0 armor. You have 916 base defense @ lvl 80.

PadmaN.7820:

There’s no such thing as 0 armor. You have 916 base defense @ lvl 80.

0 armor as in wearing no armor, read the follow up sentence, it is fairly obvious you understood what I meant. Nice try tho.

What I wonder is why they buffed the spawns instead of changing the way the event works. So basically they buffed the spawns to prevent people from easily kiting around. Apparantly they don’t want people to kite, and that’s ok. However, why not change the event to a progress bar that goes down by the number of mobs killed? Like an average defend DE in the open world?
This would force people into fighting at this part instead of cheaply kiting around.

Hi, I’m the mesmer who recorded the video (you’ll notice my GW2 account name is the same as my youtube ID).

PadmaN.7820:

There’s no such thing as 0 armor. You have 916 base defense @ lvl 80.

True enough. However, there were a LOT of abilities that would flat out one-shot us. I wasn’t using a staff build, which would have been vastly superior for this with Chaos Storm (random Aegis, might AND high uptime ethereal field, hells yes!), and in retrospect I probably should have dropped Decoy for Mantra of Pain. My point being that we were NOT a perfect setup by any means. Sure, the time warp at the start helped a lot (so having a mesmer is nice), but we found that having so many melee was actually making things harder, like avoiding ground effects with all the clutter. And after all of our attempts, we learned that the biggest challenge in the fight was beating the first spawn of 3 before the next two popped out; once you did that, you were in a solid position for rest of the fight.

And after we stopped trying to beat it “naked”, we then proceeded to flat out STEAM ROLL the event first try with horrible, lazy play. The damage difference we took AND dished out was laughable.

I’m pretty sure Anet stated that the explorable dungeons are designed around a group of players that know what they’re doing, ie. NOT pugs. Sure, the encounters force you to build your character a certain way, but isn’t that the point?