Guild Wars 2

GW2 does not cater to the mere tank/healer/DPS triat (or quinti-ad? five man groups).

I will concede that dungeons are really unforgivingly hard, but to b-r-u-s-h (I don’t know why that word is filtered) it off as NEEDING specific classes, as NEEDING a tank, healer, and DPSers…That’s simply not the case. I do think that the difficulty could stand to be toned down, but I don’t think it’s outrageous as it stands, either. However, it’s not right to simply have these difficulties and then go on about things that are simply not true.

Bosses are not outright immune to effects unless it’s in their description. Snares retain more power than other effects, but others, they do have shortened durations, and yes bosses are very, very hard to control. That’s the point. They do not throw them off randomly, they have shortened durations. And when they’re gone – there is a tell. They disappear from the debuff window right below the NPC’s name.

But you’re overstating it. Yes, its difficulty is extreme, particularly compared to other MMOs, but it’s not because of crowd control, and most DEFINITELY not because of the need for a tank and healer. No class can just sit and tank any boss mob indefinitely. They will die 90% of the time with that strategy. You are not meant to tank champions. You can tank trash and you can tank veterans A-OK if you’re defensive enough for it, but that’s not the idea for champions and up.

Also, there are tells. Every boss has tells. They have charge up-effects, or leading-up effects. To say that there are no tells, tells me that you are not seeing the tells. This is a player fault, not an inherent flaw in the game. There are always tells. Don’t get me wrong – I get hit a lot, I die a lot. It happens. But it’s just about always a fault of my own for not reacting quickly enough, or not yet knowing the boss’ pattern. There is quite an assortment of tells – be it a “charge” particle (introduced very early), a red circle on the ground, a consistent animation used for a certain attack (many fights like this, particularly starting at 35+), or just a pattern that is followed.

As an example, in Ascalonian Catacombs (explore mode, if I recall correctly) has a boss that pulls you to him, roots you, and then proceeds to slash you a million times and almost invariably kills you.

Because he roots you? You cannot dodge the slashes. So what do you have to do?

You have to look for his “pull” animation, and dodge immediately when you see it. You dodge his pull, you don’t get KOd.

As to your spec being nullified – this is why you have to be flexible. Do you think that other players approach every boss with the exact same weapon set, and the exact same utility set, and NEVER CHANGE THEM EVER? Of course not.

As a thief, running around in the world, I usually run solo with poison, dumbfire thief trap, and a power buff. When with others? I switch poison to scorpion wire to pull the mobs off of them (usually grouped with squishy people). In dungeons? Scorpion wire, thief, power for trash. For boss fights? I change every utility skill to make the boss fight go as smoothly for myself and others that I possibly can. Do I get it wrong on bosses I don’t yet know somtimes? yes.

But do I stick with a set I KNOW doesn’t work against a boss? Absolutely not. That’s not how you defeat a boss. You defeat a boss by seeing what it does, adapting to it, and overcoming it.

The first dungeon I ever did was Ascalonian Catacombs story mode, and I completed it with only one wipe, with a group of 3 thieves and 2 mesmers. You absolutely do not need the holy trinity.

Again, to reiterate, I don’t think it’d be a terrible thing to scale back the difficulty, a bit, but let’s do it in the right ways for the right reasons, not the wrong way for the wrong reasons and misinformation.

Also, for the record, I do think that they need to scaleback stability on bosses (at least sub-bosses, maybe not final bosses) in dungeons.

Honestly, bosses are probably too easy to last. Once you “get” their trick or two they’re just a giant sack of meat to beat on for 5-10 minutes. Graveyard zerging is just stupid and needs to go. Put a door before each boss and a waypoint just outside that door.

My only real complaint is when the trash comes in giant packs that all have CC, or when a mob has some kind of rapid-fire CC. There’s not much you can do against that sheer volume of roots/fears/knockdowns even if they do have good telegraphing, which they often don’t.

To everyone complaining about mobs being immune to CC, very few are totally immune, usually giants. If everyone in the group fires a stun/daze/knockback at the same time, everything else WILL get disabled, and you can even blow off their Unshakeable stacks ahead of time so you can get by with just the last important one. If anything, pure CC builds are OP in dungeons, while glass cannon and tanky are underperforming.