So I’ve been collecting a set of Power, Toughness, Vitality gear with the skin I want in HotW. At this point I’ve done each path at least a few times, and the butcher a ton of times. I tend to like dungeons, even their difficulty as true end-game level challenge (especially with pugs…)
Perusing the forums, I haven’t seen many posts about HotW. I’m guessing that’s because people either:
A) Are staying away from it given it’s history of difficulty and bugs.
B) They’re on hour 473 of clearing path 2 or 3.
I’ll start with this:
It’s really not that hard. There are a few mobs with very spiky damage (Corrupted Quaggans, Claymores, to name a few). As far as difficulty goes, that’s more annoying than challenging. But I’m more concerned with:
Boss health.
I’ve been playing MMOs for a while now, and thoughts like “Man, if this boss only had 5-10% less health, we could totally do this, let’s double down and figure out how to minmax our dps.”
In GW2, however, I find myself saying instead, “If only this boss had literally HALF its current health, it wouldn’t be so darned annoying/boring.”
It’s one thing for a dungeon path to be more challenging. It’s really frustrating when it’s also just plain longer. The combination really starts to frustrate players (especially when they run into some phantom DR).
As I see it, there are only 2 justifiable reasons for high boss health:
1. Difficulty
2. Epic Scale
I’ll give you guys 2. Nothing says Epic like a massive health pool. That is, until it takes me 4 times as long to kill the boss of path 2 than it does to bring down a Claw of Jormag…
I’m more interested, however, in #1. I come from a game that has a resource system. High health pool boss fights pose a unique challenge in that resources evaporate over time. Regeneration of resources becomes part of strategy, and scraping by creates all kinds of stress, tension, challenge, and excitement.
GW2 doesn’t have a resource system. There can therefore be no added difficulty from “endurance” fights.
What is the effect then of high boss health? A giant headache, boredom, frustration, and general malaise.
The only addition to difficulty comes from trying to fight while being unable to keep your eyes open, or simply dying of old age.
There are paths in dungeons, and players will happily tell you which, that are disproportionately long, with no real need for high health pools. On Path 2 in HotW, both of the Purple portrait dogs can have their HP nerfed by 50% and retain the same level of difficulty. One has a charge and the other uses a combo of Fear and Summoning Minions that further frustrates players by reducing dps “uptime”. The 2 subsequent bosses should have their health nerfed by roughly 25%. When you force players to kite 2 champion mobs and a boss mob, the least you can do is lower the health pool of the boss.
At this point, the only real benefit to having certain boss mobs with gobs and gobs of health is that it might help serve as a buffer to the DR that will invariably set in when you least want it to. So in that sense, Thanks? (I guess?)
TL;DR: Some bosses have unnecessarily high Health Pools. Please look into reducing them as it has 0 bearing on overall difficulty and represents a HUGE quality of life improvement.
(additionally, please consider putting a floor on token DR. Something like 10 tokens no matter what. If players want to do 10 token runs from here to eternity instead of going for 60 in another path, so be it. If your concern is a too-fast rate of item acquisition, then put in a token cap. Let’s say 250 a day per dungeon. You can get 60 per path on a first clear, and 20 after that if DR doesn’t kick in. Running the same one over and over only gives 10. Therefore it would take the 1 pathers, 19 runs of the same path all the way through to hit their daily cap, while it would take everyone else 7 clears.)
(edited by SherlockBrolmes.4725)