Guild Wars 2

Hi!
I just completed the new AC with some friends and this was the most fun that we had with dungeons in ages! We are rather experienced with dungeons by now and thus rather bored by them as well since most fights get trivial if you did them a few times and know how to play them out.
Even the new bossfights will probably get a lot easier after playing the dungeon a few times, but our first runs today were hilarious. We actually wiped a couple of times and the bossfights feel way more dynamic since the bosses actually HURT now and have a decent skill roatation speed, so that they forced us to keep an eye on our endurance

I really enjoyed this and am looking forward to the updates that you got planned for the other dungeons. Even though it probably was even more fun since it was our first run with the new boss mechanics, i am positive that after a few tries these fights will still require a lot more attention than most of the other bossfights currently.

These changes really improved the dungeon a lot and i just wanted to give some purely positive feedback here, since that seems to come short in most of the other posts.

I would still like to add some remarks (or bugreports) about issues that we noticed:

we encountered some bugs in the Bossfight in path 2:
- for some reason we were able to charge the eastern trap twice in a row (though the traps seem to be supposed to be idle after activation until another trap got activated). After that the trap stayed fully charged all fight long, but did not trigger, so we were restricted to the other two traps.

- The Boss got stuck in uncharged traps several times and did neither move nor attack. This allowed the party to fully recover without restarting the fight. Also we needed to hit him for almost a minute until he suddenly resumed fighting.

- earlier in path 2 (at the part with the 5 traps to keep the gravelings away) we all had massive FPS drops (down to 1-5 FPS) when the graveling waves spawned. We never used to have FPS issues and run all PvE and WvW events with over 60 FPS, so something seems to go wrong here.

Bossfight path 3:
- we wiped to the new (awesome) aoe skill the first time and teleported back to the waypoint. However when we arrived at the boss again, he was still fighting our NPC and didnt reset his health yet.

- when we managed to fail once again, our NPC died. Luckily we could ress him up without starting the fight, but if the NPC dies in an unlucky spot, that would force the players to fight the boss without the guardian bubble for some time. This is obviously still possible by either ressing the NPC, or interupting the boss, but if the intention here is that players can rely on the NPC to avoid that knockdown attack, you might want to revive the NPC at the location of a player, as soon as the boss resets.

And i hope time will prove us wrong on this, but our impression was that the health on most bosses was reduced slightly too much. Even though we had really entertaining fights, the health of the bosses dropped REALLY quickly once we managed to properly start attacking them. That went to the point that in some engagements we spiked down the spider and the troll to 20% HP before they actually used any major skills. This might trivialize fights rather soon, if people figured out how to make raw dps builds work, so that you can kill the bosses before they even start attacking properly.
If this actually turns out to be a problem, a possible solution here besides adding a bit more HP again would be to give said bosses a powerful opening attack which forces everyone in the party to start the fight at low health already (or just with some stacks of conditions).

Thats it from me for now.
Thank you again for reworking the dungeon, we had a lot of fun and we enjoy every bit of challenging content that you can throw at us!

i think the OP is being sarcastic.

well… i don’t think he is

I don’t think he is either. The new AC is very, very well designed imo and just has a few kinks that need to be worked out.

In path 2, we were able to trigger all 3 traps twice in a row each, but after that they stopped triggering completely. So we were unable to kill Ghost Eater. Resetting the fight didn’t reset the traps either, so we ended up unable to complete the dungeon.

I’m… cautious about praising it or dismissing it. Path 1 and the Howling King feel solid. The Spider is a bit of a pain now that its damage is so anti-melee (Guardians wept), Kholer isn’t anymore or less hard (though it depends on luck. A Necro and an Ele spawning with him is different than a Ranger and a Warrior), the Troll is still skipped unless we pair him with Kholer, but the end bosses are the big “eh”. I like the changes to Howling King—though I think Breeding King would be more acceptable now—and while all the mobs hurt my frames it was thoroughly enjoyed. The Ghost Eater… not so much. I understand the mechanics but in a pug without voice chat… it’s very frustrating. I’m sure that a group with voice chat and good communication could make the fight much more fun though. Colossus Rumblus is a different story. He’s not fun. While I appreciate making him different than Howling King 2.0, he was just made into Grenth 2.0, which is a significant con in my book. He’s not fun to fight, the massive AoE spam is frustrating and the counter mechanic (the NPC produced shield) is pretty unreliable. I’ve been in two groups against him and both times we resorted to cheesing him because it was simply easier than fighting him normally even though we all admitted to wanting to try the new AC for its content. That’s not good design.

For now, I’ll probably replace AC with Sorrow’s Embrace Path 1 and 3 as my “I’m-sick-of-CoF” dungeon.

why would you skip the troll o.O
most people run/ran AC for the easy money ^^

also I disagree with rumbulus I loved that encounter and especially the AoE spam, since it is hilarious if he knocks you out of the shield bubble when the ceiling is coming down. I don’t get why people are complaining about the encounters – it is not too hard at all, once you know how to do it and it finally forces you to pay attention to not die. That makes for more interesting gameplay than any of the old bosses.
Even the Ghost Eater can easily be done with pugs since you can just lift oozes that are within range of the traps to charge them right away. No coordination, or pulling needed.