Guild Wars 2

With pretty much every dungeon added to the game (the latest being TA:Aetherblade) there is a (let’s be charitable) discussion between people who think the difficulty is set too high and those who think it’s set too low. Obviously it’s not possible to please both of these camps with the same releases so why not release them as really easy and allow people to make them progressively harder (as with fractals or gambits) if they wish to? I’d happily forego a few months of Living Story to see this implemented so that, once and for all, we can get rid of the pointless slanging matches about difficulty and instead look critically at quality.

It’s the differnece between premade and random pug.

The only time our server complete tequelt is when everyone quit so 1 of the major guild can have the whole instance all by themself. Even the developer can’t lead a team of random inexperienced people to kill tequelt as shown in twitch.

Fotm 48 is harder than fotm 10. But friend told me their 48 group can complete it faster than a fotm 10 pug.

Also people get better when they do more dungeon. FOTM was terrible for me. I stopped doing it a long time ago because pug just is bad. I dont’ felt like playing with random pug which just wipe over and over everyday so I quit.

But when I start doing it now. I found everyone is experienced now. Infact I’m usually the one getting carried now.

Same with tequelt, I’m sure all the BG people are experienced enough they don’t really need to have organized group to kill tequelt now.

TA was hard the fist time. I spend 3 hours doing it. I’m sure in a few month people will be experienced enough to do it easily in pug. If you have some pro player they can pretty much carry you and even solo the last boss.

This game is too easy. The issue, is that it caters to so many casuals and so many bads, that they make it hard for the people who are actually good at the game.

There is this prevalent idea that you can even see on the forums where people are actually against forming groups and joining guilds. They believe that all content should be made to solo or be able to 1 shot on the first try with random pugs and that anet is FORCING them to group with others.

This is all brought along by the statement “play how you want” which is by far the most detrimental statement I have ever seen used by a playerbase

coronaas.4362:

This is all brought along by the statement “play how you want” which is by far the most detrimental statement I have ever seen used by a playerbase

I could understand what ANET was trying to say when they made that statement a year ago, and it made some sense -within reason – at the time. However, everything went downhill really fast when the bads (read: the majority of players) either took the “play how you want” concept out of context or they took it quite literally.

This is why you see so many threads about how Fractals are so hard and that they couldn’t get past the Harpy shard without a reflect class. Well, no kitten. You already know you have a chance of getting a shard where reflects are extremely useful and almost necessary, so if you opt to roll a 28 with 3 necros and 2 warriors, then it’s your own fault if you repeatedly wipe on the first 3 harpies.

But I digress…my point is that people think that they can literally play how they want and get angry or upset when they don’t do as well as people who min/max both themselves and their party composition.

It really boils down to being in the wrong neighborhood. There’s plenty of care bear heart quests and zerg trains for the casualties in open world PVE and LS pretty much caters to them.

Having LS as the sole vehicle for new “content” is probably not a good idea because suddenly the casualties find themselves on the doorstep of a dungeon and the river of tears begins to flow. Most of them just want to play and have fun, not improve and challenge their gameplay. It could never be their fault that the dungeon is too hard … ever.

And certainly there’s not a large base of players that are actually looking for a more challenging experience because you know why not? We certainly aren’t in it for the rewards. Well I’m not in that i don’t expect a dungeon to dole out 10g upon completion like some of them have posted.

I think they need a casual dungeon with a single room and a chest that spawns every 15 min so they can sit around and chat, roleplay … what ever they find fun. As long as they understand that some of us like it rough and stay away from my dungeons!

The difficulty of any content is this game is inversely related to how much experience you have with that content. Meaning, the more you play the content the easier it gets because you learn who you need to do. That being said, unless ANET introduces dynamic content that is different every time the content is consumed, the difficulty threshold will decrease over time.

There’s really no way to ramp down the difficulty in TA and still keep the appealing aspects.

Fractals and even older dungeons are difficulty-through-stats. Things have lots of health and they hurt you for alot, but they’re still tactically the same as open-world mobs. You can tweak those numbers up and make things more difficult, or tweak them down and make them less difficult. It’s difficulty on a sliding scale.

The difficulty you’re seeing in TA is difficulty-through-teamwork-and-temporary-roles. Everybody has a job to do, and the hard part is making sure they’re doing it. This kind of difficulty is binary. There’s no ‘small’ or ‘large’ amount of assuming a temporary role, you either do or you don’t.

I greatly dislike “hard” content that gets its difficulty from the devs knowing we have poor communication skills within the game. The deep combat system is what hooked me to this game, its a shame to see it entirely ignored by new content(and lots of the dissapointing old content, like arah’s story…). Gimmick bosses that force you to use environmental weapons don’t encourage skilled play. I’d prefer it if that stuff happened in a cutscene because its not fun. I wish we had more lupicus tier stuff and less elemental-ooze nonsense.

Solo,

I don’t so much mind the roles as I do the environmental weapon. I much prefer having to kite around an ooze in TA than picking up a proton pack in AC. At least I feel like my build choices are relevant when I can use my own weapon.

It’s kind of a no-win situation, I think.
Their Stat-based challenges are exciting but shallow, their placement-based challenges are unique but limited, their teamwork based challenges are diverse but gimmicky.

I think their best approach is when they’re mixing all their challenges together over the course of a path and within eachother. You’re bound to get sick of any one of them in excess.

I think the hardest game I ever played was Capcom vs. SNK 2 EO. For giggles, I cranked the difficulty up to the maximum and went through the campaign mode, or whatever the tournament story mode thingy was called (haven’t played the game in years). By the third round of the tournament match, after an hour, I gave up. I got my butt handed to me so many times and so succinctly that I knew that, if I were to practice for a year straight, I would have never gotten past that third match up.

The hardest part was that this wasn’t a numbers check, or a pattern. There was no “weakness”, or special tell you had to see. You were given an opponent who played intelligently, and also acted and reacted three times faster than you can, and had such sweet moves that every repeated failure was in itself a spectacle.

And that is where most games fail on difficulty. Whenever they give the boss a gimmick, or a big tell, or a set pattern, then the fight is no longer hard. The only “hard” part is figuring out the trick, and then after that it’s all ice cream and gum drops. Or if it is simply a stat check, then difficulty = leveling up enough. Most bosses and challenges are puzzles, or they are gear checks.

The people who complain about things being too hard or too easy, I find this represents how well someone can problem solve. The “too easy” crowd does one of two things: either they solve the problem really quickly, or they’ve looked up how someone else did it. The “too hard” crowd usually does two things: first they don’t look up how to do something beforehand, and then they are really bad at figuring out the problem. Sometimes they’ll look it up before hand, but not have to wit to figure out why their group failed when another group didn’t.

There are exceptions to the rule, such as bad design (read: fake difficulty), but generally this is how I’ve seen most “challenges” play out.

coronaas.4362:

This is all brought along by the statement “play how you want” which is by far the most detrimental statement I have ever seen used by a playerbase

/thread

Dolan.3071:

coronaas.4362:

This is all brought along by the statement “play how you want” which is by far the most detrimental statement I have ever seen used by a playerbase

/thread

QFT

It’s not as simple as “too easy vs. too difficult”.

It’s about how you design your encounter and mechanics that’s the key here.

It is absolutely possible to design an encounter that is both fair and challenging, and in some cases ANet has succeeded with that. But more often than not they fail.

For example, giving a boss (or a mob) and ability that one shots players is ok, if the attack is adequately telegraphed and there is a solid indication of how it works.

But otherwise it is not ok, especially not if the “one shot” ability is a poorly animated melee attack that is barely visible through all the particle effects.

Blizzard has turned encounter design into an artform and every one of their more recent encounters is thoroughly thought through and fairly designed. You can see this even in the trash mobs that come prior to the boss who will often mirror his abilities, albeit in a weaker form.

I will add however that ANet has made good encounter design hard for themselves by the way they designed classes. Having an ultimate attack be equally threatening to a Warrior with lots of armor and 25.000 HP and a Thief with low armor and 14.000 HP is difficult.

This is not a pug buster. I have soundly defeated it with pugs with decently fast runs. You need 5 competent players, that’s it.

Dee Jay.2460:

For example, giving a boss (or a mob) and ability that one shots players is ok, if the attack is adequately telegraphed and there is a solid indication of how it works.

But otherwise it is not ok, especially not if the “one shot” ability is a poorly animated melee attack that is barely visible through all the particle effects.

The only few I can think of is the one-shot move from the Icebrood Wolves that have literally no animation except him jumping up (at which time he’ll already have hit you), Subject Alpha p1 burn damage and maybe one or two I’m forgetting.

There aren’t many ‘badly telegraphed’ attacks in the game really. Some are ‘poorly telegraphed’ and I admit that particle effects need to be toned down even more (Guardian burn is still obnoxious), because some enemies are hard to keep an eye on.

(Que Mad Queen telling me how lupicus has badly telegraphed attacks that need to be changed and how bosses shouting ‘Ima be attacking you now’ is better)

Everything that will wipe you more than once or twice is too hard according to some. These are the guys who come to this forum and complain. Since its a lot easier to complain than it is to overcome the challenge that lies ahead.

Lets look at the most important subject first; “what makes a good/memorable instance” In my opinion its about 3 key ingredients.

- It needs to be challenging enough
- It needs to evolve around a combination of interesting mechanics.
- Due to the lack of a holy trinity you need some kind of teamplay

So what these 3 things in mind. What is the ideal difficulty for a normal (not hardcore) instance?

An instance that is hard enough to be challenging, where you are “forced” to use the mechanics (or fail) and where teamplay plays a big role in its completion. And since its not hardcore content, an instance that can be done by any random not super optimized group of ok geared people.

Everything i said applies to TA. And its one of the first 5 man dungeons that i played that has a nice combination of these 3.

And most importantly, it needs unskippable cut-scenes or dialogues. Everyone is entitled to learn story.

I found the new TA path too easy and forgiving, the final boss for example should instantly kill everyone in the room if he reaches 30 stacks with shield up, thats not the case, if you go far away from him u can survive even if u played really, really bad.

What I find interesting about these debates, is that there are people on the “too hard” side, and people on the “too easy” side, but so few saying things are “just right.” I suppose what happens is that for those who found it just right, it becomes too easy on repetition, whereas those who found it too hard just stop trying and never get to “just right.”

I agree with Bright that there are some poorly telegraphed attacks, and that the game really needs a better option to reduce particle FX (or turn them off). Timing dodge in GW2 is not as twitch intensive as some other games, but the timing does need to be done correctly enough that being able to see the attacks is important, unless you’ve done the content enough that you’ve memorized it.

The only thing I have to say about gimmick mechanics is that I wish immersion were not sacrificed to mechanics. Take the laser room from AR. Why, exactly, does the Asura turn off the laser walls and leave the safety of his control center?

What I find interesting about these debates, is that there are people on the “too hard” side, and people on the “too easy” side, but so few saying things are “just right.” I suppose what happens is that for those who found it just right, it becomes too easy on repetition, whereas those who found it too hard just stop trying and never get to “just right.”

It could also be the ‘Content people don’t come to forums’ clause coming into play.

Vox Hollow.2736:

What I find interesting about these debates, is that there are people on the “too hard” side, and people on the “too easy” side, but so few saying things are “just right.” I suppose what happens is that for those who found it just right, it becomes too easy on repetition, whereas those who found it too hard just stop trying and never get to “just right.”

It could also be the ‘Content people don’t come to forums’ clause coming into play.

I think that the too ‘easy people’ are on the forums getting involved in the community. They are discussing stats, builds, mechanics, etc.

The ‘too hard’ people come onto the forums to whine about getting kicked at the boss or how they can’t do this encounter because they are using healing shouts with a rifle.

The ‘just right’ people are playing the game.

Too hard or too Long?The two concepts are totally different.
For example CoF P3/SE P2/TA the new path are not hard.JThey are just long…
Now Arah has from both types the same goes for FotM and CM.
Every other dungeon than those is just kitten easy and fast:

CoF P1&P2
TA paths Up&F/F
CoE all 3 paths
SE P1&P3
AC all paths
CM P2
Arah P3

All of those paths are so easy that is funny.

CM p2 is a pain in the kitten without the barrel exploit imo. then again it’s probably because I suck at CM and hate that dungeon :P

Surely the barrels are intended?

All of CM and Arah P2 are pretty kitten easy as well.

Arah p1 would be on that list too if it had the intended waypoint after the Tar boss. Now it’s just a risky path because 1 fail at lupi means another run all the way back…

People will never agree about hard vs. easy because it’s not an objective thing. People generally find things “easy” if they practiced them enough or are just naturally talented for them. It doesn’t mean they are easy for others. And vice versa.
I think the proper thing to do is indeed designing challenging content to behave like Fractals and make it scale. Then people who want to bash their heads against a challenge can do that and people who don’t want to practice some fight for 50 times unless they can finally beat it don’t have to anymore. Both sides win.

I want tribulation mode in all dungeons!

Tree.3916:

I want tribulation mode in all dungeons!

I didn’t do SAB this time around but wasn’t trib mode just a bunch of non telegraphed instant kill mechanics? Id rather have a heroic mode then just whoops stepped on an invisible kill switch

Tree.3916:

I want tribulation mode in all dungeons!

Except it only kills people in zerk gear.

In fact, it removes gold and gives it to the person in the party with the most clerics, to make up for all the gold you made exploting stacking.

More like when you die you lose your items and your deleveled to 1 :O

Tree.3916:

More like when you die you lose your items and your deleveled to 1 :O

Sounds like Shaiya ultimate mode. The fond yet horrible memories.

spoj.9672:

Surely the barrels are intended?

lol of course they’re not

I refuse to believe that!

The main problem is you can’t alter the playing environment between easy and hard like you could in GW, through normal and hard modes. As the game goes you run into overpowered foes that are ridiculous and not balanced. While other times you run into foes that are easy to kill. If a foe is of the same level as you (or even 1 or 2 off) they shouldn’t be able to hit you 2 times and kill you or get you down to 10% health while at the same time requiring you to hit them 50 times or more. If that is the case their level should be many times your level-it’s not rocket science. The same goes for dungeons and especially TA which I won’t even do any more as it’s no fun, ridiculous and silly. But you can choose what you want to do and not want to do in this game. Yes you won’t complete everything if you decide not to do those things and you can try to team up with others or become a hardcore player and risk being yelled out by the pros who don’t want you in the group or leave. But not everyone is like that and don’t have 8 days a week to play or get hardcore as they have a life. The game is everything in one and there are fun aspects to this game and things that aren’t fun or possible by yourself or sometimes even in a group like some of the dungeons, etc., unless you are a pro. But the game is what it is and nothing more.