Guild Wars 2

First let’s get this out: this is non-interested, honest feedback. I’m not a “fanboy”, nor are the developers gonna add a legendary to my character just because I enjoyed what they did. I have no other interest other than congratulating with Arenanet’s devs and letting them know my opinion. Your opinion is also appreciated.

In a time where the dungeon subforum is full of angry people bashing and criticizing dungeons, I thought I would cut Anet some slack and break the mold. Granted, dungeons have issues that need to be solved, but this thread is not about them.

I just finished Sorrow’s Embrace story mode with two IRL friends on skype and two random players and boy, was that a great time. Out of all the 6 istances we’ve ran, this was by far the most enjoyable experience I had with them, and my friends both agreed with me. So I thought I’d just analyze why I liked it so much and hear other players’ opinions.

Ambient/Sound:
This has always been one of GW2’s strongest aspects and here, again, it delivers. The scenery is beautifull as basically everywhere in this game, but my particular preference of the Dredge’s themes made it exceptional. The conversations you hear (I’m talking about you, Dredge War Master) and the videos are pretty good, maybe because there’s lot of Zojja and Caithe. Also the artworks. Oh my god, the artworks. Nothing else to say, really.

General difficulty:
Almost perfect, maybe just a tiny tad too hard, but kept being challenging while not becoming frustratingly hard. We never wiped, but had various deaths. Considering we were 3 lv 80, 1 70 and 1 60 and at least 3 of us were on voice chat and thus were coordinated, I think it should be toned down. It’s a story mode after all and you want families or “casual players” to run those right?

Difficulty scaling and consistency:
I fear that one of the most rough aspects of dungeons is their “all over the place difficulty”. An insanely hard first dungeon followed by a way too easy second one, trash harder than bosses or first bosses being much harder then ending bosses. I feel like dungeons are at their best when the difficulty starts low but ramps up to a decent challenge during the last encounters. This dungeon had none of these issues. Bosses were stronger then trash, who was pretty non-threatening at the beginning but required a little bit of attention later on. A bit disappointed by the fact that the last boss was quite easier then the one preceding it (who should be toned down a bit), but hey, still a good job.

Boss fights/mechanics:
Great! Every enemy had clear indications of what attacks they were going to do and you were given enough time to properly react. Making a few mistakes was punishing, but rarely led to anything more than a down and in general you were given enough room for errors. While the mechanics aren’t exactly the most original ones, they were pretty solid, especially on the last two bosses (yes, I liked them THAT much!).

Lenght:
One thing I’m unsatisfied with. It’s too long, probably because of the HP on the trash mobs. It took us 1 full hour and we never wiped or resetted any boss, also we skipped the part where you need to bombard the army by dropping right next to the tunnel leading to the next area ( is that an exploit? ). It should be toned down to 40 minutes per average run.

Ok, I think I’m done for now, as I just noticed the scary wall of text I’ve written and I’m not sure if I actually wrote something worthwile reading in there :P What do you think, players? Do you agree with me?

Sorrows embrace is the best dungeon imo.

Every path was fun, and a right mix of challenging. Then they nerfed the hell out of inquest to make it crazy to the point where now literally everyone exploits it.

Also slavery could probably have used a tone down to the # of trash.

But beyond that its great. Most of the bosses are fairly memorable. And the mechanics for them are unique pretty much constantly.

All the kudu golems have unique mechanics (the first has a buff that ends then dazes nearby allies. Also lightning that zaps you if you’re near allies. The next one spews fire. The last poisons the ground he walks on)
Forgeman is unique
Inquest path: Nokk is unique. The golems are the same, but you have to fight them all at once. Tazza or whatever is not that interesting but eh.
Military: The guy who quicknesses and stacks bleed is fun. Also tunneling explosions. The destroyer of worlds is amazing (parkour for the win!)
Slavery has the taskmaster which is a good use of environment to harm bosses (I want to see more of this all the time) and the final boss has a mechanic that I havent seen duplicated in guild wars 2 yet. So thats good.

Basically every boss has a unique appearance/skill set. and/or some cool mechanic for fighting them. Trash could certainly stand to be toned down in a few paths. But that can be said of basically every dungeon.

9/10 would do again if I hadnt already done it 30 or so times.