Guild Wars 2

Long read incoming! But it had to be done!

Now that I have seen the entirety of the Honor of the Waves dungeon – all paths, story and explorable done – I can honestly say I feel that the second path choice in this dungeon is due for a change. A fix, perhaps, or just an update of sorts, as it is currently somewhat dreadful compared to the other options.

Let me say first that I’ve come to accept that boss fights in this game take long. It’s just how it is, and often mechanics make the fights fun or just bearable.

First remark: there’s only one Waypoint in this path. It’s a big dungeon, quite a walk back if you die at the end. Another Waypoint halfway or near the final boss might be of interest to look into.

The general mobs are fun and fine; same as always.
The first boss fights – the twin colossi – are doable. Lengthy, but with some patience and proper timing, they were quite the breeze.

So far so good, right?
A short walk more and we meet a big boss and his two champion lackeys.
What struck me as most frustrating here was the fact that none of them could be held or tanked long. The damage they cause combined is insane and their health pools… again, wow.

For this fight I just do not comprehend why the duo of corrupted Quaggan champions was even added. The boss alone is enough a pickle to deal with, with his excellent AoE and the cone of frost you must try and endure at all times!
Removing them, or rebalancing their health pools or damage output would be of possible interest.

After this, we venture underwater. The tunnel is a tad crammed, the camera flails about, but these are all things we know of the underwater combat as it is right now. We cope, and little more.

But then finally it comes! The final boss! Waiting in the furthest corner of the last room in the sunken ship. And he’s… a dreadful truck of a troll.

This path’s final boss is a dud. He hits like a truck, regardless of what you are playing as, and required a rough fifteen minutes of kiting and praying he didn’t kill anyone anymore. There was… simply nothing fun about this boss.
It’s a long fight, he can one-hit almost anything, his patterns were near impossible to see due to the required amount of kiting, and his defence stats are rather high.
(My friends confirmed that they dealt only about a fourth – if not less – of their usual damage against this apparently heavily armoured fellow.)

He then went on bugging into a pillar, and we all stared in awe as he turned invulnerable a moment. He LUCKILY did not reset and flopped out, but… whew!
Those pillars are a pain!

He died. Eventually… blub-blub-blub. Dead.
A chest. The end of dungeon loot. And a dull throbbing head with the urge to yawn.
Having some people scream in all caps, “NEVER AGAIN PATH 2 PLEASE!” after finishing doesn’t seem to be the way to go, whatsoever.
The other paths were fun, this one just doesn’t compare.

I hope this can be eventually looked into. And of course, any suggestions to make this dungeon more interesting and fun are naturally welcome, and any amazing tips of “lol you missed a mechanic”… please, give them all!

We have been barking up this tree. Ohhh since a week into release.

Still waiting on that re-re-revision of dungeon loot rewards.

I don’t like that there is only one way point for this dungeon since it’s such a long run.

Glad I’m not the only one then. Couldn’t find any particular mention of just this path… hence my massive wall of text here.

And I agree Dead.7385, the loot for this path is underwhelming too. Considering the amount of fights and difficulty.

My group was able to easily kite the boss, even moving with no speed boost you are able to outpace him and keep him from attacking. Whoever currently has agro swims in a big circle, the rest go after him.

Path 3 is much worse with the end boss. He typically seems to pick 1 person to sink with a rock and will do so every 5 to 10 seconds. Makes for a real boring fight. Not to mention underwater sucks already.

Yes path 2 is definitely the worst because it takes quite a bit longer.

Path 1 is 15 min, Path 3 is about 25-30 min, Path 2 was like 35-40 min and soooo boring.

If 35-40 minutes is bad…. wait till Arah my friend.

Arah itself is long regardless of path, and provides some challenges that are interesting rather than an endless drag. Not all bosses, but a fair few from what I heard and have seen myself.

The thing is, this second path of HotW is just undesirable to play right now, when compared to the other two. Even in terms of rewards: it’s more useful to have a “well oiled” group do path 1 three times in a row to obtain as many tokens as a single path 2 run, and far more loot worth a similar amount of time. And even that’d be, I personally say at least, less a drag than having to kite the same boss around for 5-10 minutes flat.

Just a FYI: You can pull the quaggans separately for the second boss fight. Just stick to the right wall, hit one of them with ranged, and fall back. The boss may come after you, but he will de-aggro if you fall back to the water’s edge.

I’m not sure if this is an exploit, but it’s a much more reasonable way to survive this fight.

Parisalchuk.9230:

If 35-40 minutes is bad…. wait till Arah my friend.

I’ve ran Arah a few times. The difference is all Arah paths are relatively long since it’s the hardest dungeon in the game, all paths in HotW are not long.

So of course no one wants to do path 2 in HotW when you can do path 1 twice before you can do path 2 once.

Also it’s possible to do the easier paths of Arah in ~45 min, just depends on how good your group is at fighting GL and if you need to full clear the room for kiting or not.

I don’t get why path 2 takes longer than path 3? There’s basically no trash mobs/you can skip the underwater sons of svanir+the first colossus if you so desire. The quaggan+boss fight is so easy too, you just have to have a mix of ranged+melee (the melees should back dodge the cone skill and back off when targetted though obviously) so you can keep nicely spread and kite the quaggans+aoe. Turn a complete 180 degree and run and you will never get hit by one of those spikes ever.

I just HATE that last boss more due to no combo fields to stack mights on/add damage so it takes forever. Underwater mechanics are so broken in general e.g. you can bandage yourself for 5x the speed of someone reviving AND you are able to channel it while swimming which just makes the boss so easy even when you eat his ‘superman’. Also, mesmers seem to do more damage while downed underwater it seems with like 10 stacks of confusion maintainable, I have yet to abuse this by mind blast spamming and bandaging to keep myself alive but not healed all the way.

Alias.6302

Just a FYI: You can pull the quaggans separately for the second boss fight. Just stick to the right wall, hit one of them with ranged, and fall back. The boss may come after you, but he will de-aggro if you fall back to the water’s edge.

I’m not sure if this is an exploit, but it’s a much more reasonable way to survive this fight.

Exploit or not, this is something worth looking into. Thanks for the tip.

zencow.3651

I don’t get why path 2 takes longer than path 3?

As for this. Just a personal observation, really. I guess it varies for all of us as we do this stuff, but…
The underwater part of path 3 isn’t as “intense” as the bit in path 2.
Granted that they are veteran jellyfish in path 3, they can easily be manipulated and killed. The Quaggans can even be lured onto land, and the lone fish don’t do snot for damage. The Sons in path 2… hit like trucks and glitched into walls repeatedly. Nasty!

The bosses, same story. Path 3’s boss is a dud, but granted you spread out and damage on and on, you’ll seldom die on the way, or will be rallied by one of the many jellyfishes detonating around the screen.

Path 2 lacks such a mechanic, and makes it a long kiting process. Then path 2’s boss’ capacity to outright one-hit whatever got in his path with his torpedo-style assault… way overpowered.

You wipe on that, you’re in for a long walk and a nasty swim, where Sons have bugged into walls and the boss only cuddles pillars as he goes to turn invulnerable or accidentally glitches himself into a reset. Kiting is possible, but it may lead to unwanted results.
Far worse in my book, as a whole, even if equally boring in the end.

Underwater combat: Slow and boring.

No thank you.

Agree on the waypoint. Its ridicilous to have only one throughout the dungeon. If i wanted to run around doing nothing except heading to where my party’s at, i wouldnt be doing a dungeon.

On the boss with two champions, its actually very do-able without even the need to pull the champions (to kill them first).

Have the group focus on one champion first (while dodging the boss’s aoe), then the other, then the boss. I tried this one time with a PUG, and we didnt even wipe. Dodging is very important and takes a bit of practice. To me thats a lot more fun as compared to stressing out on whether we can pull the champions without attracting the boss. Just make sure most of the people in ur group has ranged weapon equipped.

For the last boss, dont bother rezzing anyone since they can just heal themselves once theyve found a safe spot. The boss does not attack dead(or almost dead) people. There is no chance at all for this to be a total wipe. It just takes a tad bit too long to finish, but he’s a boss, what do you expect?

AdliBot.4718

Have the group focus on one champion first (while dodging the boss’s aoe), then the other, then the boss. I tried this one time with a PUG, and we didnt even wipe. Dodging is very important and takes a bit of practice. To me thats a lot more fun as compared to stressing out on whether we can pull the champions without attracting the boss. Just make sure most of the people in ur group has ranged weapon equipped.

That is exactly what we do, and it works. But it’s dull and frankly, these two champion mobs don’t add much to the fight. If they had some interesting mechanics, then I’d forgive their presence. But all they do now, is waddle about, hit stuff, ditch out more damage – while the boss himself does plenty alone – and provide another bezillion health together that makes the fight far longer than anyone would want it to be.
It takes the fun out of the fight, without even attempting to add a proper challenge to the fight as a whole. The fight would be no less difficult if they were gone. It’d just become a tad shorter, which is rather desirable, considering the boss’ health and his capacity to kill an entire team in one AoE if they’re mucking around and failed to dodge.

“So don’t muck about”, said the professional players. Indeed. Thank you, Sherlocks of the world. We try not to!
Still, I stand by my opinion: these champions are optional and needn’t be there, whatsoever, as they are now.

Same for the final fight.
What do I expect? How about a boss that provides an active challenge, rather than a rinse-and-repeat experience of swimming in gorgeous little circles, tucking spears or trident spells at him, whilst hoping he doesn’t glitch into anything.

Even just the pillars being removed, or the space to swim around in would help at least a bit, as it’d at least ensure he doesn’t glitch, gets stuck or spazzes out.

I’m no designer. I don’t pretend to know what can and cannot be programmed or invented for fights such as these, less so since by my experience, the underwater combat has yet to be perfected… but I still feel that this, even if by tiny changes, could easily be fixed into little less dreadful an experience.

After reading this (and a friend’s comment), I went there last night,… path 2 was the only one I was missing from HotW.

We had a very solid group: 2 Warriors (I, myself as tank and the other one with GS), 1 Guardian who was buffing and healing, Mesmer and Thief.

We did it with not even one run back… I didn’t even died once,… only got drowned in the last boss, he hits like a truck if you face it more than 2-3 seconds.

IMHO, Dungeons difficulty is proportional to how caotic your group is…

Agree with the OP post of only one waypoint and loot table. This is not on.

Also with path 2 you can skip the first of the 2 champion icebrood. Just head up the path to the left and fight the second boss, making sure to pull him towards the stern of the ship a bit. Then whack, whack whack him……..fun =P

I have gotten my full HOTW gear for my guardian and I have to say it, I am not doing it again. Ditto for arah, these dungeons are just waaaaaay to long and boring.

Please anet, drop the health pools down a bit, thats all I ask ?