Guild Wars 2

Iris Ng.9845:

I used to have a necro in my regular group. It’s pretty much an unspoken rule for us to cover her disadvantage during Mai fight. I always favor Earth Shield because of that.

Thats a pretty good idea. Its just sickening to me that one class would be so much more disadvantaged defensivly in this fight where it actually matters, because Anet balanced necros in PvE so poorly, and this change is only making it worse. I mean for the class that is supposed to be the attrition class, and that barely works with deathshroud in pvp because other classes can focus fire necros, because they can only soak damage not mitigate it, which is a crippling flaw with the scaling change. Granted I only do fractals into the 30s, and I haven’t done them in a quite a few weeks, and surviving on necro without straining all of your team’s damage mitigation options was at least feasible back then.

IceVyper.6810:

Nearlight, you can always play necro until you get the Mai Trin fight, and then relog to another class that makes the fight easier for you….. The Mai Trin fight is a minor part of the fractal run…

Thats another great idea, except since I typically do fractals in disorganized groups, I doubt I want to continue doing fractals anymore for fearing of being unable to complete mai trin in a reasonable time frame.. unless I really want to grind out a fractal skin in the future, but now it seems like too much of a pain, especially for rewards that are rarely ever considered good.

And for class balance reasons, one class shouldn’t be forced to swap out in disorganized groups because their class design makes it impossible to survive in such a fight. Its completely counfounding why arenanet doesn’t realize how much they have kittened necromancers in PvE from day one and I don’t get why they don’t do anything at all to fix it in any way. A cleaving weapon would be amazing, since we cover that with burst AoE and locust swarm, and just some way to make a group stronger in a similar but different way to a warrior or ranger would be amazing too. But to make a fight more difficult by leaps and bounds because necros can only soak and not nullify, when in higher level PvE you must nullfy to survive since thats how it is designed?

IceVyper.6810:

Nearlight, you can always play necro until you get the Mai Trin fight, and then relog to another class that makes the fight easier for you….. The Mai Trin fight is a minor part of the fractal run…

It still is unacceptable to not be able to use a certain class during an encounter.

@Iris: That’s extremely awesome imo.

The best part is with two earth shields, we can use Fortify alternately to keep Mai Trin inside the pulsing Lightning Field for 3 seconds. So we usually take her shield buff down pretty quickly. The shield also brings extra 180 Vitality +180 Toughness to counter some of her melee shot. Or you can give the shield to the Decoy, if you don’t have a reliable war or mesmer.

After reading a lot about new Mai on forums I was so excited about this fight and finally we got it today(even twice: 38 and 49).
I can describe this fight like that: 70% of the fight in melee, dodging mostly horrik’s attacks, meleeing mai trin(jumping aroung her like rabbit from time to time)… Yes-I was on guard, yes-I had 0-0-6-6-2 build, yes-I had knight gear with soldier runes on me, yes-we had 3 guards in party but another 2 guards had zerk gear(dont know about build)+zerk warrior and zerk mesmer.
I just want to say that there is no need to whine about difficulty: if you dont try to change something about you, people you play with→less chance to succeed
P.s. teamwork rocks

BlitzX.4039:

After reading a lot about new Mai on forums I was so excited about this fight and finally we got it today(even twice: 38 and 49).
I can describe this fight like that: 70% of the fight in melee, dodging mostly horrik’s attacks, meleeing mai trin(jumping aroung her like rabbit from time to time)… Yes-I was on guard, yes-I had 0-0-6-6-2 build, yes-I had knight gear with soldier runes on me, yes-we had 3 guards in party but another 2 guards had zerk gear(dont know about build)+zerk warrior and zerk mesmer.
I just want to say that there is no need to whine about difficulty: if you dont try to change something about you, people you play with->less chance to succeed
P.s. teamwork rocks

So what you’re saying is “have basically infinite blocks with you”.

NovaanVerdiano.6174:

BlitzX.4039:

After reading a lot about new Mai on forums I was so excited about this fight and finally we got it today(even twice: 38 and 49).
I can describe this fight like that: 70% of the fight in melee, dodging mostly horrik’s attacks, meleeing mai trin(jumping aroung her like rabbit from time to time)… Yes-I was on guard, yes-I had 0-0-6-6-2 build, yes-I had knight gear with soldier runes on me, yes-we had 3 guards in party but another 2 guards had zerk gear(dont know about build)+zerk warrior and zerk mesmer.
I just want to say that there is no need to whine about difficulty: if you dont try to change something about you, people you play with->less chance to succeed
P.s. teamwork rocks

So what you’re saying is “have basically infinite blocks with you”.

Well, ok, have to agree here but blocks blocked mostly melee attacks. Our mesmer reflected 90% of her teleport-shots and I think we missed only 3-4 of them (got 9k hit from it once that almost killed me actually because i had 10k hp left)

Did a level 49 fractal run last night. Got through the first 3 fractals in 20 minutes, spent the next 30 minutes fighting Mai Trin. Nice “scaling” anet. I genuinely believe that the devs that actually have a say in things don’t even play the kitten game.

For all those who are saying L2P just remember that the original Mai Trin already required a higher skill level than other bosses. She was better designed than most. Players needed to understand the fight or they would die. The mechanics were not easy to learn from just playing, particularly the shadowstep. There was no need to force a higher skill threshhold on anyone below fractal level 40.

Fractals, especially high level ones, were supposed to be difficult.
I’d gladly see them buffing Mai even more along with all the other laughably easy bosses.
And make the reward appropriate.

Get better. Don’t whine.

Honestly I just find that this change makes no sense. They just put out a patch to make fractals easier by making dredge a cake walk. Then you turn around and do the exact opposite in an extreme way. I personally didn’t think dredge needed a change anyways, especially not at the expense of my favorite clown car! It just shows a general lack of common sense. Now mia hits like a truck and is going to make it so hard for pug groups. I have a group who does lvl 50s every single night and have been for over a month and we had some trouble with it. I feel sorry for any pug groups. Why don’t we do a change that would actually be nice and make the archdiviner drop loot. If you want to make fractals harder give us more lvls that increase the difficulty overall.

Nick.6972:

Fractals, especially high level ones, were supposed to be difficult.
I’d gladly see them buffing Mai even more along with all the other laughably easy bosses.
And make the reward appropriate.

Get better. Don’t whine.

If the rewards were in any way appropriate, then I might agree with you, but as it stands, unless you’re part of an intense PvE guild, running fractals is now a complete waste of time.

I like PvE in this game because its so accessible to everyone, but now fractals are too hard for the casual player to really get into, and I think thats a problem. If we had some way of choosing the endboss for the fractal and the reward that goes with it, it would be great.

Say choosing the jade maw gives you the normal possible loot table. Your odds for doing molten duo could be a loot table with a better chance for skins/ascended. Maybe make mai trin reward you with a new type of fractal relic used for choosing fractal skins after 15 runs or something like that.

NovaanVerdiano.6174:

LordByron.8369:

as said i think nobody can say the fractal is balanced.
Try it at 20-30 and you see why it is not.

At 50 may be (yet is unintended, time consuming and not even fun) but at any lower level is just a mistake.

Having a level 2X mai trinn harder than any other level 50 fractal can t be justifyied.

And when such mistakes are done, fast patch rollbacks should be the norm… but i know we ll stick with this for months.

P.S. in mai trinn case, stack is NOT a trick… its the intended mechanic.
What people is doing now are workarounds.

She is immune to most CC just to tell (at least totally immune to mesmer sw2-2, chill, most cripples and stuff)

She is immune to most cc as long as she has enough stacks of her shield.

Yeah those condition/cc you would use exactly to remove her shield and becomes almost useless once she lost it…. makes sense

Ileap for example or frozen ground etc.

@nick with this game design, the difficulty resides Always in party experience and nothing more.
Fractal 49-50 will be Always extremely easy, while now helping lower levels pug runs 20-3X are the “most challenging” (i’d say frustrating + unfun) content in the game.

There is never a half way…
Its either impossible or easy (once someone put a video on youtube and Others will be able to reproduce it) that because we have outdated mechanics and an AI of games of 10-20 years ago.

Nick.6972:

Fractals, especially high level ones, were supposed to be difficult.
I’d gladly see them buffing Mai even more along with all the other laughably easy bosses.
And make the reward appropriate.

Get better. Don’t whine.

Its the wrong sort of difficult. Once you know the fight its pretty safe as long as you dont make mistakes. Which is good risk. Although i never agree with artificial difficulty in the form of damage buffs. Mai Trin was also a decent balanced encounter. It didnt need to be buffed so excessively.

The real problem comes with the barrage phases. Theres no skill there. But its almost guaranteed death for eles. I had no trouble with barrages before the patch. Now i pretty much die everytime because if one stray aoe hits me its a 1 shot. I dont mind Mai herself being more punishing (its not harder its just more punishing). But the barrages are too much due to their random nature. Unless anet wants us to exploit/cheese them with the portal trick every single time.

Joined today 3 pug parties on lvl 29, 39 and 50. All stuck on Mai Trin, all had rage quitters. Sent around some mango pies and Scarlet potions and we did them all on the first try. People kept dying though because they would walk into the fire field and every time the cannon phase hit we would loose 2 people.

On the lower levels, my guardian was wearing knight’s armor, trooper runes and cleric trinkets.
On lvl 50, I didnt have enough AR, so I had to borrow my warrior’s armor and go all berserker with scholar runes.

Overall I would say they fight is pretty fun now, and if you have 2 people that know what they are doing, you can succeed with pugs.

And I wish people would figure out not to stay close to eachother in the cannon phase…

Today in my attempt to revisit Mai Trin, in a scale 9, I got some new interesting findings.
Scale 9 is basically still first tier of fractals. Compared to before, her numbers are much higher. The shadowshots averaged in the 9k~ on zerk users, maybe even more. The cannon phase was hitting for 4k each~ as compared to 2k from before. I couldn’t be bothered by the lightning slash or horrick’s cannons because I wasn’t hit by them but the gathered info is enough to get to a conclusion.

Someone took the damage formula and gave it twice as much base damage, resulting on higher level fractals to have twice the intended damage. While she now DOES scale, the BASE is what is wrong and it IS a bug most likely because scaling has to do with increasing with time/scale, and at first tier she hits more than she did before.

For the people saying the fight is fine: it is not, the numbers are overinflated. However, the mechanics are the same and all of her attacks are avoidable, to some degree. This doesn’t mean she should be packed with instagibs and all because it makes some professions useless or have an unfair advantage. No boss in gw2 kills you for not dodging 1 attack, chances are you can survive even in zerk. The only exception is probably Jade maw which has a huge marker and very long CD. While sure, it may be challenging and fun, it’s unbalanced. I can take a bet a group won’t want to tackle Mai Trin in 4 of their daily fractals.

what I found out it only hit zerk users really hard (he did hit me on my glass cannon ele for like 12k which is absolutly annoying )
but then after i was downed the 3 or 4th time i did Change to my celestial accessory and put 6 Points into earth (and took just defensive traits) and bam it was trival for me again -.- after that she die hit me only for like 3-4.xk …
that was quite nice that just that Little Change made such a huge difference
but Overall i have to say it is quite unfair to some classes, since warrior and Guardian get much less affected by her damage -.- it would have been fair if that was more like agony damage (that it hit you even with full ar for like 40-50% over time if you are not able to Counter that attack)

regardless of whether people feel this fight is better now or not, it is a fact that this was an unintended change. I know there are many out there who want a challenge (me included) but this boss shouldn’t have been that fight. Instead, anet should just make another unforgiving boss somewhere else (maybe dry top dungeon?).

This fight with a uncoordinated pug group is a nightmare.

Aden Celeste.3650:

regardless of whether people feel this fight is better now or not, it is a fact that this was an unintended change. I know there are many out there who want a challenge (me included) but this boss shouldn’t have been that fight. Instead, anet should just make another unforgiving boss somewhere else (maybe dry top dungeon?).

This fight with a uncoordinated pug group is a nightmare.

I don’t actually think it was unintended. They even put the change into the patch notes. They don’t do that for unintended changes.

Lilith Ajit.6173:

Aden Celeste.3650:

regardless of whether people feel this fight is better now or not, it is a fact that this was an unintended change. I know there are many out there who want a challenge (me included) but this boss shouldn’t have been that fight. Instead, anet should just make another unforgiving boss somewhere else (maybe dry top dungeon?).

This fight with a uncoordinated pug group is a nightmare.

I don’t actually think it was unintended. They even put the change into the patch notes. They don’t do that for unintended changes.

The scaling fix was intented. The over the top base damage is probably unintended. Its a bit too much damage at the lower levels which results in absurd damage at higher levels. I dont mind it so much from Mai, but the cannon phase is a joke.

Today I spent good four hours in fractals 18 and 29 to sample the changes of Mai Trin. Sweet cheesus, it’s like doing 38/49 in a row while trying to educate people how the fight at Mai works, how to use the Mesmer as Decoy and how to run the cannon phase. I’m amazed at how people still think ranging Mai is best for them and not even used half of the skills at their disposal to mitigate the damage. At some point, I’ve just used my Giver’s – Centaur set to survive the cannon phase and get the job done. Anyhow, I plan to do it slowly up to 50 and see if there are any good strats for pug.

Inb4 someone suggests the portal trick, it only works when people know how it works AND pay up some cooperation. I’m a bad jumper, so I don’t want to risk myself in pugs :’(