A bit of background: I have been a casual GW2 player from the start. Never too fond of the open world content or dungeons that were too easy for my taste, I used to mainly play for the unique WvW experience but that has gone downhill for a while so I basically lost touch with the game before HoT. However the introduction of raids trully renewed my interest in GW2 that has become my “main” game since, even if I’ve been on and off the game between new wings releases.
I play raids once or twice a week with a bunch of long time WvW friends that kept in touch after our server community fell apart and we view the raids as a way to continue playing together even if the game mode is quite different. Talking builds, group compositions and strategies really brings the group together like before when we used to “theorycraft” our own WvW playstyle and I thank the raid team for bringing us back together with a new goal. Most of us exprienced PvE raiding for the first time in GW2, a couple others are veteran WoW players.
After our first raiding night in Bastion of the Penitent yesterday I kinda felt like doing a feedback post like I’ve seen a few when the Nightmare fractal was released to talk about what I enjoyed and what I think could be improved. I hope this will be received well and be useful to the developpers in a way.
Cairn the Indomitable
- The main difficulty for our group was visibility. Noticing the “Displacement rifts” on the ground was difficult because of the amount of colorful particles emitted by 10 players and a lot of us got ported even tho it’s a mechanic similar to VG that we all master at this point. The fight taking place in the back of the boss was trully a visual clusterkitten, if I do say so myself, and the fancy galaxy patches on the ground that we tried our best to avoid were barely noticeable. I understand it’s important to avoid using the same blue circles as VG to make the boss unique but I would like a slightly more noticeable outline for the rifts.
- The tanking job was very enjoyable. The healing pressure is real, the timing for dodges on “Meteor Swarm” (expending fan of red shards) and “Orbital Sweep” is tight for the tank to avoid being pushed out of the platform. However the “Meteor Swarm” projectiles are also barely noticeable when facing the boss because the shards – that are the exact color of the boss – are hard to distinguish within the boss model, up to the point where they are very close to you and you finally notice them because they contrast with the ground color. Moving the camera angle vertically helped distinguish the projectiles sooner as they move away from the boss but at the same time you lose visibility on the boss to notice when he does his sweep attack so it felt like a double edged solution.
- Another visual issue we ran into was the little light bulbs or stars on top of the green fields during “Spatial Manipulation”. It took us an hour just to notice they were here! I think they are a bit too discreet and most players may have killed the boss without even noticing them!
TL;DR: Cairn is a nice boss, the tanking job is fun as well as the healing pressure but overall the mechanics of the boss are hard to notice because of the visual clusterkitten in fight and colors that are too similar. I think a slight visual tweaking could go a long way to improve the experience on this boss.
Mursaat Overseer
- Even though the boss is quite easy, it’s also the most fun we had that night. We opted to burn the boss as quick as possible and cleave the 4 adds at the same time under the invuln buble when they reach the end of the chess board, then jumped from square to square to avoid the spikes and cleave the adds to prevent them from reaching the end of the chess board a second time before the fight is over.
- The DPS race was very thrilling, the healing pressure when a game piece reclaims the square you are onto is nice and figuring out where to go next when you are surrounded by deadly spikes was really fun.
- Unfortunately the “safe squares” spawn in a set patern so after a couple pulls it was not as fun because we already knew where to go and were less in a rush. Predicting our mouvements after this point helped us push the DPS even more and that only made the boss easier which was not really necessary. Although I’m all for removing RNG from raid encounters, on such an easy fight I think a bit of randomness on the safe squares would be more fun and help keep the fight thrilling week after week.
TL;DR: The fight is easy but nonetheless it’s a fun DPS race against the chess board. Figuring out where the next safe square will spawn made the fight very thrilling at first but once we figured out it’s a set patern the fight was not as fun unfortunately because it was too predictable.
(edited by Beanna.6712)