Guild Wars 2

I swung a sword. I swung a sword again—hey, I swung it again!
And that’s all I did in that sinking iceberg town.

Honor of the Waves as a dungeon is quite the slap in the face when I consider that line from the “GW2 Manifesto” first delivered about 2 years ago. Running the dungeon is the experience of chopping down a tree with a dull axe. I see the ending, I can do it, but man is it boring, tedious and why doesn’t somebody just give me a sharper axe?

The problem with the Honor of the Waves dungeon is honestly rather simple: everything just has too much health. That’s it. It sort of reminded me of any poorly designed difficulty system on a video game that only increases enemy hit-points based on how far you go up the difficulty scale. There should exist somewhere a formula: Fun is relative to the ratio between a respective enemy’s total unique, active, anti-personnel abilities (skills in GW2) and that same enemy’s total hit-points. If the enemy you’re fighting has 2 or 3 unique attacks, it shouldn’t have 80,000 hp because (in the system of GW2) it would be horrifically boring to wail on it for 20 minutes while its predictable attack patterns never hit you or really impact the flow of battle at all. Unforunately, that’s the case with the entirety of the dungeon leading up to the boss fights.

For an example of a good fight, let’s take a look at Lieutenant Kholer. Now this guy’s a pretty good boss. Sure, he has a pretty hefty hp pool, but he has several unique attacks to give enough variance to his attack patters and the flow of combat overall. Most importantly, his attacks (except for his AoE tow-line and whirl) are anti-personnel. He attacks you personally. That’s terrifying in the best way possible. However, the only caveat is that once you’ve seen his big attack—there’s no real surprise anymore (especially given that is has a GIGANTIC cue animation). What this means is that dodging it after the seventh time (since the interval between each big whirl attack is so long) is a little more of a snooze-fest than an engaging battle. However, the danger of outright boredom is kept in check because of how much he moves around and attacks individual players directly.

Now taking a look at the boss of the first path in Honor of the Waves, we see that he has an enormous hp pool and constant Protection, Retaliation and Regeneration (don’t argue that you can take down the totems because, while you can, the rate at which they regenerate is rather fast; since it takes so long to kill him even without the totems it effectively gives him the boons for the entire duration of the battle). Those boons are just barely skin-of-your-teeth better than giving him a straight health buff in addition to his already vast hit-point pool. More importantly, none of his attacks are truly personal. Whirling Defense just makes him stand there reflecting projectiles. All of his direct attacks are AoEs, and while he does have a pull attack (with a pathetic range), he has no gap-closers which makes the entire fight a boring ranged battle that turns into an eight-minute Maypole Dance around the Butcher with guns, bows and magic.

I could break down the rest of the dungeon’s bosses—and even the mid-bosses as there are a lot of them—but I won’t since that would be tedious and superfluous as they all suffer from the same issue. The fact of the matter is nobody wants to prove that they’ve outwitted a boss’ onslaught more than five or six times—much less twenty times. Bosses need a lot of hp to deliver a long fight to a player, but they also need several skills to prevent that encounter from becoming five minutes of pressing the same four buttons repeatedly. My advice for the dungeon would be to lower the hp of most, if not all, enemies by about 30-40% and then give the mid-bosses and bosses 1 or 2 individual-target-based attacks and maybe a gap-closer. Make the bosses MOVE. Suddenly, the dungeon becomes a lot more engaging and has a lot less “Now we get to stop here and beat this stationary ice monster with a stick for 10 minutes” areas.

I do find the high HP enemies a complete snoozefest.

More mechanics, less of this DPS everything down, would be appreciated.

Yes, I’ve been advocating this since I first did HotW because it’s blatantly horrible. I don’t see why someone could make this dungeon so obviously unfun. And I could understand that as a designer something you might see as fun could be bad when played from another players perspective. And I also understand that fun is subjective, but the depth of combat in HotW is “How long can I do this for before I develop Carpal Tunnel.”

Get whoever did Lupi, Kholer, and the fractal bosses and get them to redo HotW.

HotW, Jellyfish and Lornarr suffer from this.

Huge trees we’re meant to chop down with a stick.

It takes ages – it’s not impossible or even remotely hard, but it just takes SOOOO long.

Rika.7249:

HotW, Jellyfish and Lornarr suffer from this.

Also Evolved Destroyer.

Iehova.9518:

Rika.7249:

HotW, Jellyfish and Lornarr suffer from this.

Also Evolved Destroyer.

Indeed.

The dungeons are supposed to test our skill, not our patience.
And boy, is my patience tested whenever I decide to enter HotW.

Even though I agree with you,… most bosses in this game has to much HP making fights boring; you also have to consider that melee damage is so much higher that range damage that i can build myself full tanky and do much more damage than you at range, meaning I can melee all fights (including that first boss you found so boring) and have more fun, and do it quicker.

A lot of full zerk players get bored at fights cause they range while they could’ve built with more toughness and vitality and survivality traits and do more damage at melee.

I find that boss and the wolf boss in path 3 very fun to melee the whole fight

To the OP:

I don’t click the +1 button often, but you got my click.

Speaking of it, anyone found a reliable way to kill Aldus Stormbringer since they “fixed” his adds?

Oglaf.1074:

Speaking of it, anyone found a reliable way to kill Aldus Stormbringer since they “fixed” his adds?

did it yesterday, it didnt add much to the fight… its pretty much the same thing, though you move from the boss to adds, kill them and continue on boss. Actually it kind of adds a bit of change to such a long boring fight… that one in particular needed those adds to avoid random headbutt to the keyboard

How did you kill them? We tried that, but either another one instantly spawned and took it’s place or it vanished into thin air, and the “spawned” again at full health down by the ice splotches.

These adds need to be fixed(the way they randomly appear and disappear) and made finite.

Oglaf, that never happened to me. Adds appear, I tank them, we kill them, move again to dps the boss

I fail to see why melee would somehow change the issue where most bosses (and non bosses too by the way) have too much health.

Many npcs in this game just take too long.

ThiBash.5634:

I fail to see why melee would somehow change the issue where most bosses (and non bosses too by the way) have too much health.

Many npcs in this game just take too long.

I agree on bosses taking to long, I’m saying that playing melee usually makes it faster because you deal more damage and at the same time, most bosses in that particular dungeon are more fun at melee cause they have at least one or two mechanics to dodge which kind of awakes you from time to time

Zhaitan was also one of the most boring fights I’ve done…
using a cannon and pressing 2 for 5 minutes…. while you arent event attacked…

Oh, and another thing. Caudecus’ Manor suffers from this same problem across the board. Funny thing is, the only difference is that most individual enemies already have a pretty acceptable number of unique attacks. If CM just saw a simple decrease in HP across the board, the dungeon would become a lot more bearable and engaging. When you play the dungeon and find rooms full of thieves with spammable 12-stack bleeds and poison, KD attacks with little to no cool-down from melee and long range and rangers that stack like a minute of distortion, it feels needless to then say “Oh, yeah, and they all have 50,000 hp. Enjoy your dungeon.”

It’s like ANet is trying to see how much of the dungeon people can skip because it’s just not worth suffering through it.

Oglaf.1074:

Speaking of it, anyone found a reliable way to kill Aldus Stormbringer since they “fixed” his adds?

He’s such an easy boss with such brain-dead minions that I normally just melee him and dodge his Frozen Ground attack. Then again I like to run a D/Focus Auramancer with a bunch of projectile mitigation and protection so I normally do pretty well just tanking him. He’s sort of like the final boss for p1: he’s not difficult per se, just keep wailing on him until he’s dead and dodge his attacks. His normal ranged attack may not have a big wind-up animation, but he attacks at relatively predictable intervals. Also if you’re meleeing him you can use the little railing pillars at the bottom of the stairs for cover if you need to avoid his ice shard auto-attack.

Honestly, for the minions that he summons—I think it would be more fun in general if he just summoned another huge pack of enemies like the first mob you deal with upon walking into the room instead of like 3 or 4 stupidly fat enemies with 80,000 hp and 2 attacks. Just have another mob of comparable size to the first one (in number and hit-points per respective unit) file in in packets from all corners of the room to form a big group of aggroed baddies right in front of Aldus. There could maybe be one veteran in the mix.

Also make Aldus teleport and a two individual-target melee skills or something. His whole “I’ma stand on these stairs and play with ice circles” is a terrible boss mechanic.

HotW is probably the most boring dungeon in the game.

I cringe at thinking of the two dog bosses, luckily you don’t have to kill the first one that literally has one attack that you have to be braindead to die to, yet he has twice as much hp as most other bosses.

Then you get the 2nd dog who again has one attack that fears you to prolong the fight even more, and then summons pathetic ice elementals that die in a couple seconds anyways, but of course, he has the same amount of hp where you could afk auto attack if it wasn’t for the fear.

Literally, probably the worst “boss” encounter in the game, and the only reason it’s a “boss” in the first place is because someone at Anet decided to put a purple border around it’s picture and increase it’s health by 100×.

I agree heartily, right now honour of the waves (And while we’re at it, Arah and sorrows embrace) tends to be a battle of numbers rather than wits. Personally citadel of flame is a the perfect example of how to do a dungeon in regards to Mob health, tactics and special events, lots of variety, and not an excessive amount of time taken to take out the majority of enemies (fighting several weaker opponents, is almost always more fun than fighting a few opponents with three times as much hp).

The problem with boring bosses is that dungeons are currently too easy, making most of their content snoring fest. If you would ever try to solo or 2man some bosses you might realize they actually have some decent mechanics (not on lupi’s level but still) but in full party you can just ignore them. Good example could be Wraithlord who is currently just a buttonsmash fest where most people don’t even realize what he does (that’s actually an example a friend told me). He’s designed on really fun level, won’t 1 shot you, he’s just too easy with 5 people.

Another issue is that you can use cheese tactics to abuse some of the in-game mechanics for more efficiency but even more boredom.

However, I agree that HotW bosses has too much hp, especially underwater folks.

To add the path 2 and 3 boss are underwater with the kitten high hp and weak ranged underwater weapon they take forever to kill.

Little.1635:

To add the path 2 and 3 boss are underwater with the kitten high hp and weak ranged underwater weapon they take forever to kill.

To be fair they are also very, very easy.

Plunderer has his one-shot charge thingy, but other than that he sucks.

Zealot has very weak attacks on his own, and his suicide jellyfish are a stupid mechanic – because they die when they attack, you get insta-rallied if they bring you down!

Oglaf.1074:

Little.1635:

To add the path 2 and 3 boss are underwater with the kitten high hp and weak ranged underwater weapon they take forever to kill.

To be fair they are also very, very easy.

Plunderer has his one-shot charge thingy, but other than that he sucks.

Zealot has very weak attacks on his own, and his suicide jellyfish are a stupid mechanic – because they die when they attack, you get insta-rallied if they bring you down!

Yes, you get insta rallied if you go down but with a downed penalty, do it 3 times and you go insta gray.

You shouldn’t go down anyway. I just mentioned it because it is funny.

Oglaf.1074:

Little.1635:

To add the path 2 and 3 boss are underwater with the kitten high hp and weak ranged underwater weapon they take forever to kill.

To be fair they are also very, very easy.

Plunderer has his one-shot charge thingy, but other than that he sucks.

Zealot has very weak attacks on his own, and his suicide jellyfish are a stupid mechanic – because they die when they attack, you get insta-rallied if they bring you down!

That’s the point both have 2 things you have to look out for ( p2 charge attack and mines, P3 jellyfish and barracudas) yet both take forever to kill.

Funny why the OP doesnt complain about CoF being boring and god forbid, mind numbingly easy. However I kind of agree about the HP portion that they are slightly too high, it takes a fully zerked up team a few more minutes to kill bosses as opposed to CoF bosses (with the exception of miniboss 2 path 3 who I agree with that has far too much health). And seriously how difficult or fun is Gigantus Lupicus when u have figured out the strategy to killing him.

GW1 got it right.

That’s probably because GW1 didn’t have damage sponge enemies for the most part. It was kill or be killed and you had to be ready for it. For it’s simplicity and lack of dynamic movement features that are present in GW2, GW1 was a much faster game in general.

I’m resurrecting this thread because this issue still seems to be very alive and well in GW2.

I’ll start off by citing one phrase commonly uttered in effectively every path of every dungeon if possible: “Skip these guys.”

Whenever a group decides to skip a portion of a dungeon, that group realizes that there is a significant lack of reward in proportion to the work that they put in to clear the skipped area in question. The fact that EVERY dungeon in GW2 has a section that a group typically skips is honestly nothing short of abhorrent. More importantly, why specifically do people skip dungeon sections? What is it that makes it so much work to chew through your average GW2 dungeon mooks?

The answer: HEALTH.

Hit points, hp, red bars—call it whatever you like, but the fact STILL remains (even 3 MONTHS AFTER MY ORIGINAL POST) that there are far too many enemies in GW2 dungeons with just far too much health than what is logically sound when compared with the level of skill it takes to defeat them. This single factor brands several areas of all dungeons as “skip zones.”

You know that army of elite enemies that lead up to Frost in Caudecus’ Manor explorable mode? Skip ’em.
You know that champion ice dog just outside of the opening corridor at the beginning of Crucible of Eternity? Skip it.
You know AS MUCH OF HONOR OF THE WAVES THAT YOU CAN GET AWAY WITH? SKIP IT, PLEASE.

And the list could easily go on. And you know, maybe this will never be fixed. Maybe these fat enemies will never see the drastic health reductions that they so desperately need (as positively baffling as that would seem since such a fix wouldn’t require that much effort). However, let these areas serve as lessons in “How not to make a dungeon.” Champions in GW2 are lessons in “How not to make a mid-boss/event boss.” When all do you is take a normal enemy, increase its health 100-fold and call it a “Champion,” it doesn’t make an encounter any more challenging, rather just infinitely more tedious and less enjoyable.

Furthermore, Elite enemy presence (enemies with silver or gold rings around the images next to their names) are far too high in dungeons. Their damage is fine—a single hit from them can often turn an average fight into a tight pinch. However, the time it takes to beat them makes no sense given their low level of activity in a fight (slow attack speeds and lack of dynamic combat mechanics like gap-closers, teleports, knock-backs or pulls). These guys… I don’t even know what to say about Elite enemies. I feel like they should just be entirely removed. It’s much more enjoyable to go all Double Dragon on a dungeon area in which everything is just a crazy brawl with normal enemies that spout damage, go down quick and respawn fast enough to maintain a tense situation.

I agree and the problem with the uber health on everything is that it makes only the heaviest hitters worth while for dungeon runs. Toughness and vitality become second class stats when all you need to do for most of the fights is sit there with 100b and timewarp to reduce said boss to ashes; although you may still have to dodge if it takes your group longer than 10 seconds to take it down.

I know that this thread is a plea for something other than higher hit point pools, but until you make toughness and vitality more than just numbers on your character sheet, these bosses/trash will be the norm. Even healing power would take on a whole new light if say toughness ect. granted protection to a similar but more forgiving aura like agony when entering a dungeon for those without it. Going all out damage should have consequences but as it sits the only detriment to being a glass cannon is in not having the time to run enough dungeons in a day.

This thread hits the nail on the head. After I am done getting my ele her armor/weapons from HotW I don’t want to set foot in there again until Anet does something about the astronomical health pools of the bosses. Whittling down a boss’ health for 10-20 minutes is not my definition of fun.