Guild Wars 2

This is not a rant and while there are blocks of text, the point is to fully explain things.

I am an avid hardcore gamer, and I have been putting silly amounts of time into this game lately. I enjoy challenges, as strange as it may sound I am someone who chooses the hardest difficulty almost always. However being such a gamer there is still a point where something goes beyond being difficult and ends up being as the saying goes “Overtuned”.

I am aware that things are being worked on, and that there are still many bugs to be corrected still. Yet there seems to be a lack of communication on what direction any changes may delve into. My aim with this post is to point out that some of the current design flaws and perhaps open up the lines of communication that will keep people playing while we wait for corrections.

To start, I want to address Citadel Of Flame exploration mode since it is probably the most focused on dungeon. Really the problem here is simple, all of the numbers currently involved are simply too high. Dungeons are supposed to be hard, I get that. I understood all the intentions meant by the changes in the Magg path. However perhaps when changing things, it should have been asked why people were running that one path over and over again, why it is still probably the most run path. It was not just simply because it could be run very quickly. It was because it was the only path that was reasonable. The only thing I have seen accomplished by the changes is more frustration to the general player base.

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To get at what im saying, currently a walkthrough of the Magg path goes as follows, zone in => start path => kill prison devourer event (kill nests while being chain knocked down by devourers aka melee fun time) =>kill prison warden (ignore giant devourer and fall asleep while taking down all that hp) =>bomb event (an actual neat event which would be helped by the mortar fire being spread on several people instead of focused on a single person) and get your first likely worthless chest (needs more guaranteed lodestones/cores/actual reward) => lava escort, the first real problem of the path. Here my group sticks together with one person set to put out the fires we slowly try to escort him through the pathway only to have him die to a fire or run off to assist a ranger pet and die in doing so. So we try to ressurect him, unfortunately while doing so fire repops and kills one of our players because we couldnt reset the fire fast enough. Event Restarted, get beyond the first few fires and suddenly we are hit by several silver slimes and an imp who built an altar in the fire. It ends up being too much at once, and with nowhere to dodge or avoid the aoe we wipe. Event Restarted, we manage to get to the end and as we are walking up to the magmacyte magg decides to run back into the last fire dying in the process, we go back end up with several silver respawns and wipe again. Event Restarted, fed up we run through the pathway get behind the magmacyte and have our thief stealth us to drop aggro, magg dies at the last fire, we go ressurect him and complete the event (to no actual reward) => teleport back to the previous way point => single pull the 2 smoke lords since they literally one shot us (more on this later) => prepare everyone, we are going to try to do as the designer suggested and try to kill everything. start the event => smokelord killed, group is hurting, second smokelord spawned and killed, group in trouble, almost overwhelmed, 2 more smokelords spawn along with other mobs, people dying and running back to keep mobs off magg, chain deaths, magg makes it to 100% barely. => last boss another actually interesting fun fight, dungeon complete (badge bug crying).

Ok, so a few things for this path design comes to mind. First of all, maybe its us, maybe we just are doing something wrong, or perhaps our characters need to focus on different set ups, perhaps we need more toughness. However to have such a requirement in itself is flawed. Players should not be expected to run some cookie cutter build in order to do anything, it takes away from the fun. But, I dont think that is the actual problem, because looking at the fights, the problem is in the numbers. Things have too much health, things respawn too fast, if we were to take a defensive build or even a partial defensive build, the numbers are still too high we would get overwhelmed, probably worse since we could not put out the damage needed.

To continue in CoF, path number two the Superweapon. Honestly there is nothing wrong with the path in my opinion, it was actually fun minus some of the dying but that can be cleared up with more experience. Though we were unable to finish the path because the crystals on the actual Superweapon spawned so fast that we could not manage to kill them in line with moving him away from the furthest ones and poisons. We ended up being overwhelmed by them and having some of our people die from him/crystal dropping damage. Ok so another numbers problem here.

Finally the last path, hello torch event. I do not particularly like events that require perfect timing, they tend to ignore the fact that we are on the internet where latency can sometimes be an issue. But we figure it out, we have each person get near a torch and time the killing of the spawns to align and give us time to countdown and hit the torch. This takes 30 min because the extremely short window to hit all the torches combined with fast respawns (15 seconds?) winds up being a problem. Not to mention that soloing 3-4 imps that can hit extremely hard especially when you run out of endurance to dodge, sucks a lot. Finally we time it right, something that will go better with practice, and low and behold a neat little event where we chase a guy and eventually kill him. Giving us our first chest of worthlessness and leading into a survive/protect the point event (notice the trend that there is one of these or similar on each path). We manage to kill the first three groups and finally get overwhelmed on an incinerator and 2 smokelords. We try several more times and end up deciding our time better spent smacking our heads into brick walls. Now I have read that people have found success here via some kiting, and that to me sounds like a sign of not really being able to handle it. So at this point I honestly cant say what the rest of this path is like.

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And that in a nutshell is my experience with all the CoF paths as they currently stand.
Now my opinion and I mean no offense to the designers in saying this, is that the numbers being used to calculate what players can do are extremely out of touch. Otherwise I think the dungeon would be fine. How do you fix it? well what I think should be done is a combination of reduce spawn time, reduce overall damage outputs by mobs (one shots are bad unless they are meant to be punitive for failing obvious things you should avoid), reduce mob hp, and in events reduce the amount of silvers that spawn at once. Example, the lava escort is simply too much and the ai for magg has some severe issues, if the respawn was not so fast and you didnt get hit by things like double silver magma worms and a silver imp and a silver slime all at the same time, it would actually be fun and perhaps with the proper tuning dare I say challenging.

Now to compare things, a quick rundown of Twilight Arbors 3 paths.
Up Path: Spiders hit a little hard (give melee a way to avoid stonetouched spiders), blossoms respawn too fast, knights hit way to hard and knockdown too much, last boss is a joke that you can range down from the doorway. However all in all very doable, maybe even too easy at points.
Forward => Up Path: Overgrown knockdowns a bit much, melee once again needs a way to avoid it. Stealth bees interesting and fun, having them come after the stealth runs out at the top or running into blossoms at the end, not so much fun. Mesmer boss has too much health, and is very punishing to melee, but all in all doable. Last boss on this path fun and kinda neat.
Forward => Forward: Way too much trash, but a lot that is skippable. Archer in the bubble fight neat and fun, players should not be able to shoot through bubbles. 3 Knights with boss fight is kinda dumb and generally unfair, generally end up killing 1 or 2 and then wiping/resetting until the boss is alone. Last boss has a similar problem to the first in that you sit in the door and range him down while making sure spawns dont overwhelm you.

TA unlike CoF is all doable. While some of the things do a bit too much numbers and stun wise and there is a lot of punishment for being melee it does not have the respawn problem (blossoms aside) or escort issues of CoF.

Another quick comparison: Ascalonian Catacombs
Scepter path: nothing too hard, scavengers pin down hurts too much though I guess it can be interrupted with an organized group. The escort event kinda stinks but again being organized very doable. Traps are fun if not inundated with mobs.
Ghost Eater path: buggy, very buggy. Havent actually completed this path because Detha has bugged out on the part to fix the mortars every time even after supposed fixes. Not sure whats causing it, though my suspicion is that it has something to do with the spike trap event bugging out and not doing damage/boss not coming and getting killed when we go back in.
Last path (fogot the name): Double protection event spawn is extremely intense, perhaps too much so, otherwise this path is about the same as the Scepter.

Overall AC, bugs need to be fixed, but overall doable though not extremely fun. Things tend to be more annoying than enjoyable.

Id compare the other dungeons, CoE, Arah, CM, HotW, SE, but frankly and fairly I have not spent a whole lot of time in those places yet. I did do a bit of Arah and found that the risen suck as melee, but thats not any different than what is expected. Also mobs in CoE are harder than bosses.

All in all, what im trying to get at is where is difficulty supposed to be. What kind of numbers are expected from players incoming and outgoing? Where are designers getting that information for balancing purposes?

I feel like there is very little real communication between the developers and players going on. We don’t need the exact details, but simply saying “changes are coming” does not help. Bugs are a problem to be addressed, but as with all things those will be fixed with time. Give us some sort of update as to what is generally being done, let us know what to expect and what is expected of us.

In other words, please Anet, communicate and give us proof that you are listening to the feedback.