Guild Wars 2

Pugs seem toh ave developed a taste for simply going around the big ol’ ghost. I’m dissapointed by this because it means you lose out on a good test for “Is this group a bunch of twits?” and oh course, to borrow from Rikkiti: SHINIES!
Plus, it’s actually a pretty fun boss for me.

So yeah. Hope this gets fixed, because it’s annoying how people keep skipping it imo.

The best solution is to have bosses drop tokens, which is what they’re considering. Give the player a better reason to fight him, then they’ll fight him.

Source – https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/4-hours-of-Arah-EM-and-no-shards/first#post396424

(Scroll up the post, for some reason the link throws you in the middle)

I think it is already fixed. Lately in my AC runs, I’ve noticed that troll don’t spawn as frequently as before.

It still spawn though.

runeblade.7514:

I think it is already fixed. Lately in my AC runs, I’ve noticed that troll don’t spawn as frequently as before.

It still spawn though.

yea it’s more the leaving him out completely part.

Guilty as charged right here. I never mind fighting him but I’ve been pugging alot recently (my usual dungeon partners have been working alot. Dang jobs :P) and it’s the norm for me to ask “Skip Kohler?”

Like I said, I never mind fighting him but if majority rules than I equally have no qualms about it.

Why?

Because he’s not worth fighting. No tokens and meh blues/greens.

They should make every boss worth tokens again, but not actually physically reward the player with those tokens until the end of the run so you can’t just hit the first boss over and over again like before.

Like have a token counter that pops up after each boss displaying your token count for that run (like a slot machine display) and then when you finish the run it “cashes” out.

Come to think of it that’d be really fun aesthetically. lol

People legit get ticked off if someone screws up and pulls Kohler in an attempt to skip him. We’re all human. lol Even if the group doesn’t rage at the poor shmuck who accidentally pulls everyone’s just like “Fantastic. A time sink.”

The incentive just isn’t there which is sad since he has more enjoyable mechanics than any of the final bosses of that particular dungeon.

Basically the best and most viable reason for anyone to fight Kohler at this point is to unlock the waypoint.

Sure you could argue it’s cuz he’s fun but fun only takes you so far. Then it becomes somewhat monotonous and when that happens, you need incentives in place to counter that state of mind.

“Seen this a bunch of times already, but it’ll go towards that shiny sword I’ve had my eye on”

Every group I am in fights this guy

1) waypoint is important
2) loots
3) he’s easy to beat

dunno why u are saying more and more people are skipping him, I would argue that the time you spend to kill him is made up by the fact that you can waypoint back to his area after doing the next part of the dungeon (in runs 1 and 2)

yep he’s easy to beat but he’s a waste of time in my eyes and for what, a wp and a chest? The wp you won’t even need unless you have a group of low lvls (less dps, survivability etc) that tends to die like flies.

It’s also probably okay to skip him, why else make a way to pass him from the sides?

Make Kholer, or any boss for that matter, not take 5 minutes of semi-AFK auto-attacking to kill and maybe I’ll actually consider killing me.

Enemies in general have too much health and people are rarely up for beating on the same mob for the 30th time.

In my opinion a boss should take a minute to kill, tops, from a moderate DPS team. If he hasn’t killed you by then he’s not going to kill you ever.

well sorry for the noobishness ._. but the troll attacking the ghost is a bug?

i was told was part of the line intended i really cannot see how it could be a glitch seeing a boss that ignores completely player and proceed towards the ghost >.>

its not even so near so i thougt its scripted…..

I got 10 silver on the troll. No fancy dance moves can save you Kholer.

I think Anet already mentioned making chests more valuable. That’s really all they need to do to make people want to kill the guy.

What’s the challenge on Lt when you kill it like this

People skip stuff in dungeons because there is no point. We’ve all killed them at least 5 times before and since they don’t give us any good loot or tokens, the incentive is just not there. You can’t blame the players for this problem.

I have to fight with someone pretty much on every PUG run because they want to skip him. Usually they are decked out in full CoF gear and they say “Why fight him? theres no reason. I needs my tears and I have to get them all in 5 minutes” I tell them that I fight him because he is part of the path, drops good loot and I like having the waypoint. When we start fighting him its always those people that get sucked right in and die frequently……L2P people, this is one of the easiest bosses in the game. Usually skipping him causes more problems than it solves. I have actually had people refuse to fight him even if he is aggro’d.

Kholer is a joke if you know how to dodge, or are able to pop stability. We typically will skip him if we’re doing path 2, but 1 and 3 it’s handy to have the waypoint to reduce some running (not from death, just running in general).

All they need to do to fix the mob skipping part (in all dungeons) is up the chance of receiving yellow loot from trash, and up the rewards in the chests. Chests should offer a higher chance for exotic sigils/runes, or rare crafting matts. I also think chests should have a 10-15% chance to drop dungeon specific armor (exotic). The current system is the running joke with my guild. Killing a boss mob for whites, blues, and greens is a waste of time, and the only reason why content gets skipped regularly.

I like the idea of the token counter someone mentioned above to keep people from farming the first boss.

our grps never skip kholer and we still do AC in 15-25 mins depending on path.

Wow… that numbering system.

I’m twitching right now, just so you know.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

It’s not an exploit to skip Kholer. He’s a bonus boss that unlocks a central waypoint, drops loot, and also gives a chest.

People skip him because:
A) He’s hard if you don’t know what you are doing, and don’t communicate enough.
2) Our changes to our token rewards moved the tokens out of his unlocked chest, so people don’t feel they have to fight him to maximize gains
III) Our dropped loot is abysmal, so you’re not finding anything of value.

Solutions:
A) He’s supposed to be hard, it’s explorable mode. We should aspire all our bosses across all difficulties to be of similar difficulty.
2 and III) We are currently re-working and changing our loot for dungeons. I had previously hoped that it would be in for the next patch, but it requires a lot of tuning and testing, so it might take another patch.

So the new loot wont be in the Halloween patch ?

Loot in general should be fixed. Spending ten minutes on a dragon so that one person in the zerg of 50+ gets a rare and everyone else gets shafted? No thank you.

The last time I fought Jormag I got 1s 26c or something like that, 3 blue drops that sold for 1 silver or less, and one beryl orb that sold for 1s 50 c.

4s total for a dragon. Impressive. xD

But that’s a story for another forum. My point is that the dungeons are suffering from the same problem. The fact that the chests are pointless to okitten pretty disheartening. I ran TA for the entire day three days straight across two characters to get my gear from it and the best thing I got from a chest was a corrupted core. Neato. 5 silver. I’ll go get the parade license.

Chests at the moment are basically just ways of saying, “hey, go clear out your inventory real quick.”

Also if you type the word “open” followed by the word “is” it gets filtered… I lol’d. Might want to check that out, forum ops. xD

@DarthDevil

They never said when they would rework dungeon loot before, but they did say that they would rework end of personal story loot in the 10/28 update

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/story/End-Story-Loot-spoilers/page/6#post346959

At least Robert admits that people’s complaints are right. There is no incentive for us to clear bosses because they give crap loot. Kholer is easy anyways and I use to kill him every run then got tired of it because it’s just a waste of time. Also next time people are saying skipping is exploiting I’m going to quote Robert on this to shut all of them up.

I keep hearing about how dungeon loot is going to get changed, but I don’t know what direction it’s being looked at. I know you all don’t want locked into something, but I still wish I knew what you were thinking.

I can’t wait for an update to dungeon loot. Hopefully that’ll give people more incentive to fight and kill stuff instead of skip everything they possibly can. It’s rather ridiculous that people are so afraid of doing the actual content on a path, and it’s only going to be harder for new players to fully enjoy dungeons in PUGs — and guild teams as well. I’ve been in guilds that skip just as much as PUGs, because it’s faster, easier and no reason to kill any extras.
I feel more dungeon content should be gated, maybe require a certain amount of mobs killed before the party can progress. Or have leftover mobs gather at a boss fight at the end of a section to make skipping a risk vs reward thing. Like if a group keeps alive too many mobs, they’ll get swarmed during the boss fight.

Anyways, yeah. It’s sad that people rather skip parts of dungeons, rather than just playing them. This kind of thing happened in Guild Wars 1, and pretty much destroyed everything elite areas stood for, or were meant to stand for. If I wanted to speedrun, rush and skip, I’d be playing a Sonic game on my Sega… seriously.

I run AC almost everyday in a guild group for sub 20 minute runs per path.. like Robert said, after they took out tokens, there is no reason to fight him.

The waypoint is useless for anyone that has done any path more then once because the next event for each path is almost impossible to fail.

For anyone saying his loot is good… it’s the same as every other boss, which is useless. I can go to Orr, do a DE event, and get way more loot from trash mobs in the same amount of time.

Kholer is supposed to be hard? If you keep a distance of around 500 and kite left right in a fast rhythm, all his hooks will miss because the game cannot correctly predict the player’s position.

Kholer has an easy to reproduce strategy to separate him from his ads, you can even abuse the cave troll to kill him. People do not skip Kholer because he is tough, they do so because the speedrun is everything.

I am against skipping bosses. Doors should be closed for as long as Kholer is alive.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

Solutions:
A) He’s supposed to be hard, it’s explorable mode. We should aspire all our bosses across all difficulties to be of similar difficulty.
2 and III) We are currently re-working and changing our loot for dungeons. I had previously hoped that it would be in for the next patch, but it requires a lot of tuning and testing, so it might take another patch.

Kholer is what got me hooked on this game and seriously elevated my respect for GW2. As long as the rewards scale accordingly, I fully support making more bosses as challenging and communication-required as Kholer.

I think the question is why bother with Kholer when he is not related at all? He doesnt unlock a door, he is not part of the story, he doesnt drop anything nice (well 99.9% of the time). Sure we take 5 min to down him and his friends… but what for? Unless maybe he starts to drop a decent amount of silver, then people might actually want to kill him

I saw in the Dev Tracker, “How long until the Lt. ex…” and when I held my mouse over the link, the status bar said, “https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game...t-exploit-is-fixed-in-AC-explorable/478200”
And then to the left, it said the following:

@Dacromir

It’s friday friday friday friday

So I thought, “Hey, what? Are they doing a bugfix patch today?! Cool, I wonder which ones…”

And then I came here and saw what he really meant.

And you think Kholer is hard. If Kholer is hard then what is Subject Alpha?

I know; he is just plain ridiculous. I thank god that I have Blink on me. I can easily escape from those crystals.

If your “teammates” refrain from charging towards your crystal rescue, you will only get your own double circle and you will survive it, because you are frozen in the middle and Alpha’s inner circle of death is harmless. So what kills you is not the crystal, not Alpha’s attack, but in 95% of all cases, it is your teammates.

Both bosses are about equally “difficult”, meaning you got to have that “aha” moment. Which is a nice touch, but far from unfair in terms of difficulty.

This is something incredibly hard to balance.

In one hand, ArenaNet wants people to enjoy fighting bosses, so the experience feels rewarding and not just something on the way to the true prize. In other hand, if fighting bosses is too rewarding, people would just enter a dungeon to kill the first boss they find over and over, since that would be considerably faster than doing the entire dungeon itself.

It’s the same kind of balance with having enemies dropping good loot. In one hand, if an enemy has the chance to drop unique and desired items, the system is unfair due to being random – someone who fought the boss and helped the entire party could get nothing even after multiple tries, while the new guy who was mostly hitting the boss once in a while and trying to stay alive could get a fantastic drop in his first try. Which is one of the reasons why the token system is to great… But at the same time, tokens lack the feeling of actually receiving something great, and they are more part of a prize than the prize itself – people who get tokens know they are not getting enough for something cool, not without doing the dungeons some more times.

I really do not envy ArenaNet’s task in trying to balance the reward system. It’s something very hard to do properly.

Robert Hrouda

It’s friday friday friday friday

It’s friday, gotta get down on Friday.

No but seriously, GET BACK TO WORK ROBERT HROUDA!

It’s a little disheartening to see a developer come out to say that skipping encounters in a dungeon is not an exploit. Avoiding Kholer means intentionally jumping to the side from the staircase and skirting his platform – he will aggro if you simply walk up the stairs. To me that spells out that he is INTENDED to be fought, not to be optional.

@Robert Hrouda,
I really hope it gets kicked in at Halloween patch or during halloween, since a lot of people is going to come back to play from exams or taking a break, and is going to be what most of them needed, as well talking from the experience I got from my guild.

Said this, if it need more tuning, take your time, in the other hand, as soon as posible, the better for everyone, and that includes you guys, we love your dungeons, and we love to do them, and we will not mind a bit more of drops <3 and difficulty in a time near the future like hardmode

Remove the stealth nerf on rare drops/magic find too you guys put in weeks ago.

JonPeters.5630:

To SteveMJH,

Same thing that Rob said about dungeon loot is also true in open world. I recently started looking at this and its literally such a bad chance of getting good loot from those big world bosses. Champions as well, the numbers are just too low. The Halloween patch is just too close to put this in and test it, but we are also working on improving this.

Jon

I don’t mind the (short?) wait while you guys test this patch. We want it now yes but if we get it now and it’s bugged it’ll be the original DR system fiasco all over again.
My brethren, be patient! And Enjoy Halloween!

Thanks for noticing that loot is scarce in open world / bosses.

Ultimately, those are things that cannot be automated so us players would be the only one getting such good loots.

I really miss the “boss hunting” from GW1, hope it’s made viable again

Thanks Jon. Any chance you guys will also scale up the rewards for down leveled lvl 80’s so that people have reasons to go back to the lower zones?

@Red Falcon; Agreed. That’s one of the biggest aches I’ve suffered in GW2. I want to kill bosses and get epic loot. I’ve been turned off doing dungeons simply because the effort/time put in doesn’t match the reward.

I want to go and slay the Risen High Wizard, one who wields the might legendary Twilght/Sunrise/“Eternity”, have an immense battle and get rewarded big for it. Or maybe go and slay a Claw of Jormag, Lieutenant of Jormag.

I personally believe the really poor loot table is what drives many people off the “end game” content, also making gold a hard grind.

To SteveMJH,

Same thing that Rob said about dungeon loot is also true in open world. I recently started looking at this and its literally such a bad chance of getting good loot from those big world bosses. Champions as well, the numbers are just too low. The Halloween patch is just too close to put this in and test it, but we are also working on improving this.

Jon

That is awesome to hear. Thanks for taking a look at the loot situation and working to correct it. I’ve done about 30 boss events with chests at the end and the only rares I’ve gotten have been those medallion/crest items. A few weeks ago I used to get a pretty decent amount of rare equipment doing these events.

On the topic of Kohler, I’m guilty of skipping him. AC is a pretty PUG friendly dungeon and Kohler stands out as the most unfriendly boss to PUGs. I just don’t like to watch my groups bungle dodges on the 5-6mins to kill him while I’m left tanking him. As a boss he’s one of the more interesting ones for me because he focuses me every time and does more DPS than I do HPS, so I’m required to dodge a lot.

I’m also guilty of skipping a lot of trash cus, why not?

It’s not an exploit to skip Kholer. He’s a bonus boss that unlocks a central waypoint, drops loot, and also gives a chest.

People skip him because:
A) He’s hard if you don’t know what you are doing, and don’t communicate enough.
2) Our changes to our token rewards moved the tokens out of his unlocked chest, so people don’t feel they have to fight him to maximize gains
III) Our dropped loot is abysmal, so you’re not finding anything of value.

Solutions:
A) He’s supposed to be hard, it’s explorable mode. We should aspire all our bosses across all difficulties to be of similar difficulty.
2 and III) We are currently re-working and changing our loot for dungeons. I had previously hoped that it would be in for the next patch, but it requires a lot of tuning and testing, so it might take another patch.

Oh, I didn’t mean to imply it’s an exploit (though in hindsight, I suppose that’s exactly what I did. )
I like the guy because he’s a genuinely interesting boss to fight. Many bosses have a gimmick that just gives them flavour. Using another example in the AC, the spider-queen; while in the beta, 2.5k damage or so a tick in the poison attack was brutal, now the attack is borderline irrelevant. With the Lt, you actually have to pay attention, instead of sitting there on auto-attack watching the health bar slowly go down. He’s also mobile, so you’re forced to keep track of the muppet. Again, I find many bosses let you just stand there doing auto-attack and/or aoe spells without really giving things a second though. Having him leaping around all the time means you can’t just switch off and only bother to watch for his ‘special attack’ like (once again) other bosses.

The final reason I like him is perhaps less charitable. As I mentioned in the OP, it’s a great way to quickly weed out idiots and see if a pug is vaguely competent. If you can’t be bothered to res someone else or you have dodgy durability, I’d rather find out about it before the big set-piece/boss fight. In some ways I see the Lt. in his current form like the mission Thunderhead Keep back in the day for Guildwars 1. For those of you who didn’t play Guildwars 1/didn’t do that mission: if you couldn’t work together in a team, you’d almost certainly not pass it. There was a marked difference between players before and after it for quite a while.

I’m truly looking forward for at least an acceptable chance to get gold and sometimes exotics (legendary prerequisite included obiouvsly) from big chests, as expected after a long epic battle. Not a stupid bunch of blue trash. Pure waste of time.

I’ve seen two exotic drops in my 100 member guild, one was off trash mobs in Orr and the other was off a trash mob in Honor of the Waves.

JonPeters.5630:

To SteveMJH,

Same thing that Rob said about dungeon loot is also true in open world. I recently started looking at this and its literally such a bad chance of getting good loot from those big world bosses. Champions as well, the numbers are just too low. The Halloween patch is just too close to put this in and test it, but we are also working on improving this.

Jon

I hope you guys take into consideration how hard some of the world chests are to find, not just how hard the boss is. I solo’d the Yak’s Bend grawl cave superooze yesterday and got two blues and a white. Even though practically nobody bothers to try exploring that place and it has cool mechanics.