Just want to sum up my thoughts here, I see some echoed in a lot of threads. I’ve done most story modes now and quite a few explorables. I really feel some of the things are badly designed… or more accurately, designed by different people that have different visions on how encounters should work.
Some issues that I have:
- Bosses not projecting attacks. I’m fine with having an attack 1-shot me, that’s what dodge is for. But I can’t see when the attack is coming because the boss is bathing in particle effects. It’s really kitteny when I know an attack will come soon, but still die to it because the boss is so covered in kitten that I can’t tell when he’s about to do it. Have them yell something or make it more clearer or something, it’s really ridiculous. This one is a major issue for me. In a lot of fights I’m just healing my way out of big attacks rather than dodging because I can’t for the life of me see them trigger. Judging by the amount of times other people in my party suddenly lose 50% of their health, I’m not alone in this. I just can’t see the mobs when there’s a million spell effects on top of them.
- Graveyard zerg. I thought they’d change this one after beta. If you wipe, you wipe. When people are just respawning at the graveyard constantly prevent a reset until the boss eventually goes down, you have a badly designed encounter. You learn absolutely nothing from the encounter and it really isn’t any fun at all. I want the people in my group to learn. I want us to come in here next time and succeed the very first try. Can’t do that if people don’t learn anything.
- HP bars. Wow on this one. Some fights take waaaaay too long without posing any challenge at all. Smashing your skills for 5 minutes watching a bar slowly drain is not fun.
- Difficulty completely off from one encounter to the next. Take a look at CM for a great example here. The Golem at the beginning is reasonably challenging with a 1-shot skill and high damage. Then the entire dungeon from that point on is a complete faceroll. Other winners here are CM and SE, where you have a tough encounter followed by 20 minutes of snorefest. It’s like 1 dungeon was designed by 5 different people who all thought things had to go their way. Why is it one boss takes off 60% of my health when he hits me, when the next one deals less damage than I can heal?
- Reward. This one is a big joke. You get almost no XP the entire run long, then get 70% of a bar at the end. Same thing for every dungeon, which is ridiculous as some take twice as long as others. None of the loot that drops seems unique in any way. It’s all vendor trash and tokens which we need hundreds of to buy anything. When they announced “Each player gets their own loot”, I did not interpret this as “Each player gets their own loot which they can then vendor for a few copper”. My bad I guess.
- Boss and mob design. There’s some really creative stuff going on here. The final bosses of SE, CoF and TA are well designed encounters. But there are so manykittenencounters that feel like the dynamic event bosses out in the world. You know the kind; where 5 people just slam on top of a mob and just wail on him until he dies.
- More boss design. Some bosses simply cannot be meleed. Some bosses you should not use conditions on. All fine in theory, until you realize this kittens some classes. Yes, every class has a ranged weapon, but a Guardian in range is nothing but a pet on auto-attack. Certain Necro/Engineer builds just don’t work on the SE boss that heals for every condition on him. That Mesmer has some really nice looking robes but wow is his DPS kittene when he can’t keep his Phantasms going or his illusions die before they get shattered. Certain bosses render certain classes utterly useless. That is not well thought out. Yeah, you can kill a boss with 3 guys and 2 dummies just goofing around, but it takes forever.
- Tokens being soulbound. Seriously. When you have multiple characters at 80, you pick the class that helps your team the most. I don’t want to grind a dungeon 40 times on every single one of my characters. Please make these things accountbound. Don’t make me force my mesmer into a group when we already have 2 other mesmers, just because I need the tokens on that character.
I love how difficult the dungeons are. I hate the reason they’re so difficult.
I hate how I can’t see what the hell is going on when the boss is covered in flames, death, ice, rock and millions of lights.
I hate how everything has a gazillion HP.
I hate how one mob presents a very good challenge and then the next 5 can have 5 people autoattacking while not paying attention to their screen.
When they announced the removal of the Holy Trinity, I was so happy. But if this is the alternative, I think I’d like it back. It’s chaotic and poorly thought out.