What Guild Wars 2 can learn from DARK SOULS

What Guild Wars 2 can learn from DARK SOULS

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Posted by: Suaveh.6392

Suaveh.6392

- PvE content can be challenging, rewarding, and fun WITHOUT huge health pools on enemies
- Unique avoidable and learnable enemy patterns are CHALLENGING
- Huge health pools are TIME CONSUMING

Conclusion: Please SIGNIFICANTLY reduce trash/boss health pools (and up damage if you want) so that people can enjoy your content!

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Posted by: runeblade.7514

runeblade.7514

If you up damage too much, then there is zero point in having toughness/vit.

5x Warrior, 5x Ranger, 4x Elementalist, 4x Engineer,
4x Necromancer, 3x Mesmer, 4x Guardian, 4x Thief, 4 Revenant

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Posted by: Milennin.4825

Milennin.4825

Aren’t Dark Souls and Guild Wars 2 two completely different games…?

Just who the hell do you think I am!?

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Posted by: Suaveh.6392

Suaveh.6392

Aren’t Dark Souls and Guild Wars 2 two completely different games…?

Yeah, one is challenging and rewarding PvE and one is something I need to afk with autoattack for 10 minutes each elite

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Posted by: Milennin.4825

Milennin.4825

Aren’t Dark Souls and Guild Wars 2 two completely different games…?

Yeah, one is challenging and rewarding PvE and one is something I need to afk with autoattack for 10 minutes each elite

You go afk with autoattack on Alpha or Giganticus without dying, and show me a profession with an elite that has a 10 minute cooldown.

Also, why are you playing a game you don’t enjoy over a game you do enjoy? Your other game is over there.——>

Just who the hell do you think I am!?

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Posted by: FourthVariety.5463

FourthVariety.5463

To be fair, Dark Souls never tries to simulate combat in which 5-20 players fight with one giant monster, or 10 monsters try to attack 10 players. For the most part, it is a 1on1 combat system.

If you do fight the Dark Souls bosses with 2-3 other players, then the combat system unravels as quickly as if three GW2 players mash buttons fighting one monster.

As a single player experience, I agree with Dark Souls being in an entirely different league than GW2.

But as far as playing with friends and multiplayer is concerned, Dark Souls just does not cut it. GW2 has its strength when social interaction is the thing you are looking for.

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Posted by: Suaveh.6392

Suaveh.6392

Aren’t Dark Souls and Guild Wars 2 two completely different games…?

Yeah, one is challenging and rewarding PvE and one is something I need to afk with autoattack for 10 minutes each elite

You go afk with autoattack on Alpha or Giganticus without dying, and show me a profession with an elite that has a 10 minute cooldown.

Also, why are you playing a game you don’t enjoy over a game you do enjoy? Your other game is over there.——>

I meant elite mobs, not skill

And I’m not palying atm so I’m trying to suggest improvements since otherwise the game has alot of other strengths

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Posted by: Lorana.2468

Lorana.2468

Dark Souls is just artificial difficulty though, you learn through dying, theres nothin remotely difficult about it, i’ve even seen a japanese guy kill one of the bosses with nothing but his fists.

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Posted by: Strifey.7215

Strifey.7215

Dark Souls is just artificial difficulty though, you learn through dying, theres nothin remotely difficult about it, i’ve even seen a japanese guy kill one of the bosses with nothing but his fists.

Actually Dark Souls is real difficulty where everything is based on your skill. Sounds like you think difficulty = gear checks and high health pools.

You pretty much proved this point that a skillful player can kill the first boss in Dark Souls with his fists because he knows all the tells of each move, when to attack, when to dodge, etc. Everytime you die in Dark Souls, you die because of your own lack of skill. Not because of a cheap unavoidable attack or because you have a lack of gear.

If you actually researched or played the game, that’s the exact reason people love it and why the reviews are so positive. It goes back to old school gaming with clean controls and gameplay that punishes you for being bad, not because you don’t have proper gear or because every encounter takes 10 minutes to kill. If you actually play it or read reviews, you’ll notice many times people say “I died but it didn’t feel like I died because the game was cheap, it’s because I didn’t do ‘x’ or I could have done ‘y’ better.” DS is a game where everytime you die you learn something, and eventually it becomes easy because your skill level rises. That’s exactly what the devs said when explaining the game, they expect you to die 100s of times to learn from your mistakes and eventually conquer the game.

Many modern games are the opposite, there is very little skill and it heavily weighs on gear checks or high health to slow people down.

Anyways, as far as the OP, I love both DS games, but this game is completely different and some of the same things that make DS great aren’t going to work in an MMO…

Guard/War/Mesmer and Dungeon Guides:
https://www.youtube.com/user/strife025

(edited by Strifey.7215)

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Posted by: Lorana.2468

Lorana.2468

no it’s because he died, over and over.
and how in any way is muscle memory skill, thats no different than me never taking a single hit from Subject Alpha because i know exactly when to dodge roll.

the only way your ever going to get true difficulty out of a boss is if the boss is random, the fight is chaotic to the point where you cannot guess or predict what’s coming next.

if you know what’s coming, and when it’s coming it’s not hard and it never will be, why else is WoW PVE so easy these days? because addons do it all for you, it’s not that much different from GW2 tells.

Artifical Difficulty in another form, that’s all.

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Posted by: Oh Snapalope.1378

Oh Snapalope.1378

Dark Souls is just artificial difficulty though, you learn through dying, theres nothin remotely difficult about it, i’ve even seen a japanese guy kill one of the bosses with nothing but his fists.

As a person that has clocked over 500 hours on Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls, this is so wrong. In Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls, your player skill and quick judgement is everything. If you died it’s because you are impatient or reacted at the wrong timing window. Those 2 games are very skill dependent and for my 500 hours of play time on both games, the difficulty doesn’t feel artificial at all.

Soul of the mind key to life’s ether
Soul of the lost withdrawn from its vessel
Let strength be mended so the world may be mended
So the world may be mended

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Posted by: Oh Snapalope.1378

Oh Snapalope.1378

Dark Souls is just artificial difficulty though, you learn through dying, theres nothin remotely difficult about it, i’ve even seen a japanese guy kill one of the bosses with nothing but his fists.

As a person that has clocked over 500 hours on Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls, this is so wrong. In Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls, your mechanics and quick judgement is everything. If you died it’s because you are impatient or reacted at the wrong timing window. Those 2 games are very skill dependent and for my 500 hours of play time on both games, the difficulty doesn’t feel artificial at all.

Soul of the mind key to life’s ether
Soul of the lost withdrawn from its vessel
Let strength be mended so the world may be mended
So the world may be mended

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Posted by: Strifey.7215

Strifey.7215

no it’s because he died, over and over.
and how in any way is muscle memory skill, thats no different than me never taking a single hit from Subject Alpha because i know exactly when to dodge roll.

the only way your ever going to get true difficulty out of a boss is if the boss is random, the fight is chaotic to the point where you cannot guess or predict what’s coming next.

if you know what’s coming, and when it’s coming it’s not hard and it never will be, why else is WoW PVE so easy these days? because addons do it all for you, it’s not that much different from GW2 tells.

Artifical Difficulty in another form, that’s all.

He died over and over while learning, he didn’t die over and over to zerg it down. Everytime you die you have to start over.

And lol at thinking muscle memory isn’t a skill, muscle memory is the major part of any skill based game. I’ve played competitive FPS for years, a huge part of being good is muscle memory. Amazing “plays” in any game is hugely influenced by your muscle memory from playing the game for hundreds of hours. Sounds like you’ve never actually played a hard or competitive game in your life.

Guard/War/Mesmer and Dungeon Guides:
https://www.youtube.com/user/strife025

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Posted by: Suaveh.6392

Suaveh.6392

no it’s because he died, over and over.
and how in any way is muscle memory skill, thats no different than me never taking a single hit from Subject Alpha because i know exactly when to dodge roll.

the only way your ever going to get true difficulty out of a boss is if the boss is random, the fight is chaotic to the point where you cannot guess or predict what’s coming next.

if you know what’s coming, and when it’s coming it’s not hard and it never will be, why else is WoW PVE so easy these days? because addons do it all for you, it’s not that much different from GW2 tells.

Artifical Difficulty in another form, that’s all.

I am not saying there is not 1 boss in GW2 that employs a reasonable skill requirement (i.e. learn moves/enviro/tells to win boss), I am saying that 99% of the time this is not the case and it is simply stacking HP so it takes forever to create an “illusion” of difficulty which is unacceptable because really it is just DEAD EASY PvE that happens to take hours because of hp pools

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Posted by: Crater.1625

Crater.1625

Actually, Dark Souls is really an illustration of why you do need to give significant health to enemies, at least relative to how much damage players can dish out in an alpha strike.

There are many, many interesting enemies in Dark Souls that are completely trivialized by the player’s ability to build a character in such a way that all of those interesting enemy abilities don’t matter, because the enemy dies before having a chance to properly threaten the player with them.

If you take the Ornstein and Smough boss fight as a specific example, finishing that fight with purely melee-oriented combat style, using an ‘average’ strength weapon for a player who has reached that point in the game, you have a very challenging, interesting, fun fight that tests a player’s skill, and forces the player to learn, understand, and be able to counter every single ability that O&S have. It’s also a fight that takes quite a long time to win, unless a player has absolutely mastered the game.
Alternately, you can learn Pyromancy, and burn the entire boss fight down in under a minute or two, without learning how to avoid or counter anything but their most basic, most telegraphed and least dangerous attacks. And you might not even have to do that, because you can kill them so quickly that you’re unlikely to even run out of Estus Flasks to heal with before they’re dead.

Similar fights are found all throughout Dark Souls (Sif is another one, or even Taurus at the beginning of the game, compared to fighting him with a melee weapon). And even aside from the actual boss fights, later on in the game it becomes commonplace to see players slashing enemies down before they can even counterattack, killing them before they even run out of Stamina.
Eventually, the only encounters that pose a serious threat to anyone who isn’t playing recklessly are the ones that are designed to surprise the player with a sucker-punch if they don’t know exactly what to expect. Nearly all of the care and all of the skill that the designers of the game put into designing its enemies is rendered effectively moot, because the player’s ability to just overwhelm the enemy with damage is much, much stronger than the enemies’ ability to withstand that damage.

In this respect, Guild Wars 2 has a much better balance. There are a handful of specific bosses that definitely have more HP than they deserve, but the standard dungeon Elite/Silver enemies almost universally strike a good balance between having enough survivability that you actually have to deal with their attacks and other offensive capabilities, without turning into a slog that takes forever.

On the average, with an average (PUG) party, it has been my experience that encounters with Silver enemies take approximately 20 seconds per enemy to complete, unless you screw up and end up on the backfoot for the whole fight, just trying to survive.
With that in mind, I’ve asked this question in probably a dozen different threads about this subject, and I have had zero people actually answer me: How long do you think that these encounters should take, per enemy, to win?

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Posted by: Nuka Cola.8520

Nuka Cola.8520

gw2 isn’t good enough to learn stuff from the ultimate master race game such as Dark/Demon’s Souls.

Fact: every Thief tells you to “l2p” when the subject is to nerf stealth.

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Posted by: LordByron.8369

LordByron.8369

I’ll tell you a secret….

Dark/demon’soul was just a big stroke of LUCK.

That game is a concept old of more than 10 yeras its the adapting of an old game called “king’s field” to a new technology, and the game resulted hard due to lot of ISSUES in tha gameplay (read your character moves are slow).

The real thing is that dark souls, despite having a fantastic graphic (not tehcnically), its a game based on a AI of 10+ years ago….

The game was really easy for old school players that instead of trying creative strategies just were accustomed to adapting to Playstation1 lvl AI. (AI is not even a word i would use…. because enemies use just 2-3 patterns).

Some old players may have recognized what happened….

Not a wonder dark souls was a complete copy of demon’s souls and i bet the sequel will be the same….because no offence but the game had a huge success due to inflation of FPS and such and the lack of other games…(easy to understand for console players that knows its easier to see 6 cod per year than a single action rpg).

Also PvP was a joke based on huge glitch repeating the same lag abusing tactic forever….

So really even comparing dark soul (a BUDGET game that had lot of LUCK) to a game with the complexity of GW2 is a nonesense imho..

And remember if a complex game like gw2 has bugs, a simple game like DS has lot more and even worse, and they even force you to exploit some of them calling them “challenge” lol.

P.S: and just to be clear i play that serie from first king’s field so i m not a hater…..

GW2 balance:
A PvE player is supposed to avoid a 1-2 second 1 shotting aoe.
A WWW player is considered uncapable of avoiding a 5,75 second aoe for half his health.

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Posted by: Jin Saotome.5320

Jin Saotome.5320

Well it looks like a lot of gamers are even worse than PS1 levels of AI, which goes to speak as to how utterly terrible games (and players) have gotten lately when a series that follows a “take it slow, pay attention, wait for opening” approach to combat still manages to be some of the more challenging stuff in recent times.

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Posted by: Krosan.2890

Krosan.2890

Go play Dark Souls (which is an entirely different game, might aswell start comparing GW2 with Call of Duty) then and stop complaining on forums of a game you seem to hate.

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Posted by: LordByron.8369

LordByron.8369

Well it looks like a lot of gamers are even worse than PS1 levels of AI, which goes to speak as to how utterly terrible games (and players) have gotten lately when a series that follows a “take it slow, pay attention, wait for opening” approach to combat still manages to be some of the more challenging stuff in recent times.

its not so….but you should learn 2 simple facts:

1) someoene posted about artificial difficulty….

2) when VG becomes a thing, people started realizing that BAD games needed you to learn patterns of things that will happens, wherever good games let you understand and adapt to things giving you hints rather than forcing you to learn scripts dying until you saw them….

Also despite GW has some similar issues (i hope will be fixed), the game essence of dark/demon s soul, require you to learn how to exploit AI……
Its just hilarious that people didn t notice it and instead thought the game is HARD.

What do you think is better:
a memory based action rpg or a logic, tactical intelligence based mmorpg?

GW2 balance:
A PvE player is supposed to avoid a 1-2 second 1 shotting aoe.
A WWW player is considered uncapable of avoiding a 5,75 second aoe for half his health.

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Posted by: chrisdeans.2739

chrisdeans.2739

Right now gw2 has stuff to learn from every single rpg game that has pve content

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Posted by: Negativity.5801

Negativity.5801

Idk about all this. I like to wear the Dark heavy armor set and start rolling around pretending I’m Silent Chief Yurt. I think that puts GW2 pretty close to Demon Souls and Dark Souls.

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Posted by: Jin Saotome.5320

Jin Saotome.5320

I can’t quote for whatever reason so @LordByron
The following is more of a general reply with some added points as well as addressing the points (or at least trying to)

1) I wasn’t going to touch on this but Dark Souls and Demon’s Souls has barely any artificial difficulty as very few instances will straight up instantly kill you (and moves that do you can see coming from a mile away in most cases) that are not the player’s fault. In fact, you can blaze through the game with any weapon/armor/stat combination (you are also told how to execute every single combat related skill within a few minutes of the game, said mechanics don’t change at all either so they’re nice and constant) as long as you’re careful and understand the mechanics which is not only about pattern recognition but also involves tactics and preparation before hand as simply trying to rush through won’t work a majority of the time. Movement (or movement speed) isn’t an issue, and neither is attacking/defending. The game gives you all the tools you need to avoid ALL damage regardless of where it’s coming from and who is throwing it your way. Actually, Demon’s and Dark Souls are so good about this that they threw out the whole “all weapons of the same type attack the same” (this is basically how builds work in the game along with armor/stat combinations) out the window and instead each weapon tends to have its own move set (some with bigger variations than others).
This leads to interesting combinations even among the same weapon types where some weapons are better for thrusting, some are better for piercing, others are better at slashing, then add elemental types, etc, etc even though they’re all part of the same family (must be noted that none of this information is even remotely required to advance through the game but it is stuff to do once you hit the meta-gameplay stages after your first or 2nd playthrough) and as a result you can get quite creative on how you approach enemies. Same thing for magic, casters start out much weaker than melee but still very doable. Archery is the weakest by far but it has it’s advantages, specially against stationary bosses provided that you bring the right arrow type to the fight or enough arrows (pulling can be quite useful in GW2 as well, specially if you have a bunch of people that are new in the group. The dungeon takes longer but it’s easier for players to familiarize themselves with the attacks this way), which means that knowledge and tactics are being applied to every encounter as well as preparation before hand should you want to.
*It is possible to completely ignore almost every single game mechanic in the games and just brute force your way through it (heavy armor, spells to increase damage resistance, high poise, high stability shields, elemental greatswords) which to no one’s surprised also works with a good number of classes in GW2.

I honestly can’t say the same thing about the combat in GW2 for PvE (PvP is a whole different monster), specially when it comes to ranged combat and targeted skills. Melee combat is much better about this as you can usually use regular movement to avoid attacks (not dodging) due to melee range limitations. Ranged combat in the other hand has quite a bit of tracking on it, making single target spells not really evadable via movement unless the projectile is ridiculously slow. This puts GW2 in this weird half-action/half-classic MMO target and press hotkey middle ground gameplay (which a lot of people like and is sure as hell a nice improvement from your typical western MMO, but can be improved even further) where you’re like “Well I could just move out of the way but that projectile clearly has GPS on it or something so I’ll just sit here and take those things like a big boy” so it becomes less about avoiding all damage to just avoiding the big attacks that will surely down you.

Cont.

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Posted by: Jin Saotome.5320

Jin Saotome.5320

Part 2

2) Here’s the thing about video game difficulty and patterns… that’s how enemy intelligence currently works. All of it, in every single game ever with zero exceptions. It doesn’t really matter how you go about it, the “intelligence” is scripted and follows only the variables that are coded into the game. This is a processing power limitation more than anything, we currently do not have the hardware to due true AI, or any complex scripting that won’t cripple your performance when applied to the scale that an MMO needs. With that said, even Dark Souls manages to give enemies attacks that they will rarely use normally, but will trigger under specific circumstances throwing a bit of a curve ball at you at times and punishing you accordingly if you fail to avoid it. Now GW2 does have some things going on for it but they’re implemented poorly and affect you in varying degrees depending on how close you like to stand to enemies. I’d like for the special effects overall to be made much cleaner and enemy calls to be a tad more noticeable, now this isn’t really a problem if you run a melee heavy group but if you have a lot of spells going on this can be an issue for the smaller and faster attacks. You are on fire, the boss is on fire, there’s purple butterflies all over, you have rain falling, stuff erupting from the ground, bunch of circles on the ground and even zoomed in you go “I can’t see a kitten thing!”.

Ultimately the better game will have have a good mix of both pattern recognition and tactical adaptation, the problem is that these things once figured out lose a lot of the challenge (and then the tactics kind of just become pattern recognition and memorization anyway) and that’s something that is pretty hard to fix at the moment due to said hardware limitations mentioned earlier. Maybe in 100 years MMOs won’t be like this, who knows…
Like I mentioned earlier, I would take Vindictus bosses over the current GW2 bosses though, or hell even a middle ground between both would be more than fine. While it’s a lot of pattern recognition, you still need good reaction, preparation and knowledge of all your moves and the boss’ attacks otherwise you will get wrecked even if you are higher level.

Done.

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Posted by: LordByron.8369

LordByron.8369

@jin…
For gw you needdifferent tactics for different situations,, for DS you just need to know enemy pattern and backstab or pierce.

for 2) its not like that…

There is a difference between an enemy that does the same pattern like: slash/slash/slash/trust EVERY time you are in front of him and an enemy that randomize attacks…..

A HUGE difference….in DS opponents does the same exact things according to your position….

The ONLY and i repeat ONLY way to kill opponents is exploiting this basilar SCRIPTS (AI is too generous).

In this way they doesn t even need any sort of balance (and the PVP system showed clearly that…..possibly worst pvp system i ever seen).

DS doesn t stand a chance against any game if not for his superior scenography, artwork and audio that are truly masterpieces…..

Its a game old of 3 generations simply roughly ported to a 3d environment….

Then new players started to create a universe of inexhistend complexity and challenges….that are nor intented nor wanted.

The game is just hugely misunderstood and the producer just saw that was a good thing to pretend all was intended….

I just have a proof
play king’s field then play dark souls…..(same team same atmosphere same dynamic almost same story…..).

If you are openminded you’ll find that is just a porting.

What could GW learn from DS?
Colourpalettes and heavy armors design…..just that ._.

P.P.S. also human females leg length lol that are somehow strange in this game…

GW2 balance:
A PvE player is supposed to avoid a 1-2 second 1 shotting aoe.
A WWW player is considered uncapable of avoiding a 5,75 second aoe for half his health.

(edited by LordByron.8369)

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Posted by: Jin Saotome.5320

Jin Saotome.5320

Same thing applies to DS, please try to backstab any of the bosses and get back to me, try to apply your strategy to Ornstein and Smough, Gwyndolin, Sif, any of the new DLC bosses, etc. It doesn’t work at all. The only one that you can easily parry is Gwyn and the whole fight is designed for him to be a huge pushover (dying old man). The enemies don’t even do the same thing according to the position, the enemies will kick your shields (thus breaking your guard), dodge your attacks, counter, parry, will try to knock you off ledges, they will attack you from range (if ranged, just like GW2). Attacking enemy shields will get you easily killed. Approaching the enemies properly and proper positioning is using different tactics for different situations. Let’s not completely ignore that a 3 warrior and 2 guardian setup can just brute force it’s way through most of the dungeons, bosses included with no issues. No, having to move out of red circles is not “changing your strategy” which is the bulk of movement in most dungeons anyway.

Your whole comparison to King’s Field is well…silly. First of all, Demon’s Souls is a spiritual successor to King’s Field and it borrows from the atmosphere, music, design and…that’s it. Dark Souls went back and instead of having a hub like in DeS, it has an open world. This is what proper sequels do though, they take from the original and improve and build on it which is exactly what both DeS and DaS have done. It’s not an old game ported to a new environment, that’s some serious grasping at straws right there.
The combat is a whole other beast and king’s field doesn’t have most of the mechanics that are present in demon’s and dark souls, making the comparison invalid in that area. Comparing a game with first person combat where the sword swings are clearly FPS style (where the way the weapon swings isn’t necessarily tied to how it hits, similar to how the elder scroll games handle their combat) and they’re fat bullets with short range to a game whose combat and weapons all have proper hit-boxes and a bunch of other mechanics tied to them for movement, etc.

As to what can GW2 learn from DS in general? How about making enemies that can actually kill you instead of having most fights consist of enemies with huge HP bars where you flail at them for 5 minutes straight with little chance of actually dying unless you’re asleep on your keyboard and your drool is magically making your character jump off to its death. Playing musical chairs and dodging the absolutely obvious “insta-down” attacks is Zzzzzzzz.

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Posted by: AWSUMSAUCE.4372

AWSUMSAUCE.4372

Dark souls. The worst game I have ever had the misfortune of playing. GW2 – one of the best.

Not gonna go into why I couldn’t stand Dark souls etc etc just want to say 2 completely diff games. People enjoy different types of games, if GW was more like DS I would be playing it. Along with many others.

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Posted by: Zinthros.6589

Zinthros.6589

I agree. Cut all dungeon monster and boss health pools to 75% and see where that goes. Whether or not you’re going to clear the boss / room or wipe is determined, IMO, a fair bit before the 50% mark, and everything after that is wasted time and boring drivel. But to be safe let’s make it only a 25% reduction.

Varamyr Langkron / Kirk Vandergrift
Commander on Tarnished Coast [RE]
Greatsword Ranger before it was cool

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Posted by: Plato.6128

Plato.6128

Aren’t Dark Souls and Guild Wars 2 two completely different games…?

Yeah, one is challenging and rewarding PvE and one is something I need to afk with autoattack for 10 minutes each elite

You go afk with autoattack on Alpha or Giganticus without dying, and show me a profession with an elite that has a 10 minute cooldown.

Also, why are you playing a game you don’t enjoy over a game you do enjoy? Your other game is over there.——>

I think that he was using hyperbole. I think that GW2 has some well-designed encounters and some ones that are kind of uninteresting. The two you pointed out are in my opinion among the well-designed fights in this game, so I see where you are coming from. On the contrary though, take HotW. I run this instance a lot to help guildies get their power/vit/tough gear. Obviously, the OP’s comments were exaggeration, but standing around auto attacking for 10 minutes is sometimes how that dungeon feels! None of the encounters in HotW are exceptionally difficult, but a bunch of the bosses have so much hp that the fights just feel very time consuming. This is obviously my subjective outlook, but if you cut their health pools by 20%, it wouldn’t change the difficulty there much at all but would just make the timing of the place feel better.

On the whole though, I think we should all be rooting for more interesting bosses! What is done is done, and even though some of these older dungeons might get patched, it is probably more realistic just to look forward to new content like this upcoming fractal dungeon. The fact that the description of this place says that it gets harder the more you run it sounds pretty cool. I hope that harder does not mean cheap 1-shot tactics, but rather things you can learn to play around.

Tryndamere Hardrada
[CERN] – Tarnished Coast

What Guild Wars 2 can learn from DARK SOULS

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Posted by: SeventhSon.8172

SeventhSon.8172

This ^

I don’t mind one shot tactics in a dungeon, if there is also a way to skillfully avoid it.

Remember Fallen Lunatic from Diablo 3?

What Guild Wars 2 can learn from DARK SOULS

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Posted by: Suaveh.6392

Suaveh.6392

Dark souls. The worst game I have ever had the misfortune of playing. GW2 – one of the best.

Not gonna go into why I couldn’t stand Dark souls etc etc just want to say 2 completely diff games. People enjoy different types of games, if GW was more like DS I would be playing it. Along with many others.

That was the least helpful comment so far in the thread, thanks for contributing nothing to the discussion.

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Posted by: Suaveh.6392

Suaveh.6392

As to what can GW2 learn from DS in general? How about making enemies that can actually kill you instead of having most fights consist of enemies with huge HP bars where you flail at them for 5 minutes straight with little chance of actually dying unless you’re asleep on your keyboard and your drool is magically making your character jump off to its death. Playing musical chairs and dodging the absolutely obvious “insta-down” attacks is Zzzzzzzz.

This man nailed my point

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Posted by: spreadsheets.9805

spreadsheets.9805

no it’s because he died, over and over.
and how in any way is muscle memory skill, thats no different than me never taking a single hit from Subject Alpha because i know exactly when to dodge roll.

the only way your ever going to get true difficulty out of a boss is if the boss is random, the fight is chaotic to the point where you cannot guess or predict what’s coming next.

if you know what’s coming, and when it’s coming it’s not hard and it never will be, why else is WoW PVE so easy these days? because addons do it all for you, it’s not that much different from GW2 tells.

Artifical Difficulty in another form, that’s all.

I don’t think you understand the term “artificial difficulty”. Even if you had to die to most enemies in Dark Souls to learn their patterns (you don’t), that’s not “artificial difficulty” at all. There’s still legitimate challenge to the player’s gaming skill, some people are going to be better at recognizing attack patterns than others, some might be better at responding to them.

“Artificial difficulty” is when there are cases where you can’t beat a challenge even though you have all the mechanical and analytical skills required. This actually happens in a lot of games, but Dark Souls is probably one where it’s the least prevalent.

You can kill every enemy in the game without leveling up your character or your weapons, although not upgrading your weapon will make it take quite a while. Your ability to do so depends solely on how well you are able to learn and how much attention you pay. Pretty much every enemy has very clear tells for when he is dangerous and when you can attack.

If you look to Guild Wars 2, on the other hand, there are quite a few cases of “artificial difficulty” which come to mind. The most prominent is probably a low level player trying to take down a high level monster. This game (as opposed to Dark Souls) is not designed so you can avoid every attack against you. Dodge roll and invulnerability skills are way less prevalent. You can kite, but once there are more than 10 levels between you can the mob, it becomes immune to your conditions. With this in mind, there are quite a few situations where you can only level up your character to even have a chance of defeating a certain enemy.
Here’s the kicker though: You may have noticed how I tried to distance myself from the word “artificial difficulty”. That’s because it’s a dumb concept in my opinion. I don’t agree with people who place their mechanical skills on a pedestal and act like they should be able to beat every game as long as they can push the right buttons. RPGs in particular tend to have a lot of character stats and a lot of depth to allocating these in the right way.
I don’t see a problem with pieces of content locking players out who can’t spend their stat points wisely, even though that’s exactly what people mean by “artificial difficulty”.
Theorycrafting is a skill like any other and players should have to acquire it.

What Guild Wars 2 can learn from DARK SOULS

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Posted by: poiuy.3907

poiuy.3907

Great post OP!

I wish GW2 and a lot of other fantasy mmorps would learn from Dark Souls.

I bought GW2 on head start and I was utterly butterly bored with the kitten easy, alt tab 1 2 3 4, skill-less button mashing game play that I stopped playing GW2 after a month.

And then, I stumbled upon the PC release of Dark Souls Prepare to Die edition and OMG! I finally found an RPG (multiplier not MMO) with really hard, uber-tastic skilll based quality game play.

I have not been able to stop playing Dark Souls and this is after months and many hours. Dark Souls game play and general combat is just sooooo much better, soo much harder and sooo much more fun, challenging and rewarding than what’s available in GW2 and other mmorpgs.

I was totally shocked by how good Dark Souls is. And I just happened to stumble upon it. The game had no massive multi-year hype. I totally just stumbled upon it and was totally blown away (it’s one of my all time, all star bestest games evar).

I hope many other online games try to copy it’s game play features. I also wish GW2 armor skins were more like the ones in Dark Souls.

What Guild Wars 2 can learn from DARK SOULS

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Posted by: Suaveh.6392

Suaveh.6392

Great post OP!

I wish GW2 and a lot of other fantasy mmorps would learn from Dark Souls.

I bought GW2 on head start and I was utterly butterly bored with the kitten easy, alt tab 1 2 3 4, skill-less button mashing game play that I stopped playing GW2 after a month.

And then, I stumbled upon the PC release of Dark Souls Prepare to Die edition and OMG! I finally found an RPG (multiplier not MMO) with really hard, uber-tastic skilll based quality game play.

I have not been able to stop playing Dark Souls and this is after months and many hours. Dark Souls game play and general combat is just sooooo much better, soo much harder and sooo much more fun, challenging and rewarding than what’s available in GW2 and other mmorpgs.

I was totally shocked by how good Dark Souls is. And I just happened to stumble upon it. The game had no massive multi-year hype. I totally just stumbled upon it and was totally blown away (it’s one of my all time, all star bestest games evar).

I hope many other online games try to copy it’s game play features. I also wish GW2 armor skins were more like the ones in Dark Souls.

Thanks, I want this game to suceed but the serious PVE right now is so slow and boring something needs to change for long term success

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Posted by: Tiriyon.8735

Tiriyon.8735

Well, to the main issue that seems like people are ignoring completely:
I agree tha health pools are way too high.
I don’t agree with increasing the dmg since I don’t want the end game gear to have ridiculous numbers like – 13,582 dmg in few next updates and expanssion like WoW.
(I don’t want the gear to affect anything but that’s another story).
I do want to add a feature that I would like to see (and wish) in-game:
implinatation of “random” boss and general creatures attack.
By that I mean that each boss (and possibly any elit creature) will have an inventory of random selected patterns/skills which will be selected randomly before an encounter.

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Posted by: omgwtflolbbl.7142

omgwtflolbbl.7142

Aren’t Dark Souls and Guild Wars 2 two completely different games…?

Yeah, one is challenging and rewarding PvE and one is something I need to afk with autoattack for 10 minutes each elite

You go afk with autoattack on Alpha or Giganticus without dying, and show me a profession with an elite that has a 10 minute cooldown.

Also, why are you playing a game you don’t enjoy over a game you do enjoy? Your other game is over there.——>

To be fair, if you have a teammate that provides you with a bit of AoE healing and condition clears, you can pretty much just drive path 1’s Alpha into a corner, press 1, and go AFK. Heck, I’m pretty sure you could get 5 guardians with maces (AoE heal on 3rd autoattack) and have them all AFK autoattack on that path on that path. Actually, you could probably do that with a lot of bosses – wouldn’t exactly be fast, but it’d probably get the job done.

But really, there are tons of bosses and mobs with terrible design. Let’s take just CM, for example. In CM, you’ve got:

Bandit archers that spam invulnerability for absolutely no reason other than to live longer, and do absolutely nothing interesting other than stand there (and occasionally blind you – woo).

AoE bomb tossing mobs that are only dangerous because the tell on their one actually dangerous attack gives you pretty much no time to react if you’re anywhere close, especially when you factor in the fact that their TINY MODELS will probably be obscured by FIVE THOUSAND PARTICLE EFFECTS (a very common problem, sadly).

Tons of mobs that just sit there unable to move while you wail on their face, because movement is overrated. Everyone knows that when you’re using a rifle, the best thing to do when someone comes up to your face is to stand there and take it like a man!

A caster centaur mage (I don’t think this thing even deserves to be called a boss) who spouts a bunch of jibberish while you afk next to him, while pretending to be dangerous and threatening. I’m pretty sure Vallog has got to rank among one of the worst designed bosses I’ve ever seen in any game.

A boss that poses absolutely no threat because at most, she can down one person at a time.

A boss that goes invulnerable for no other reason than to, again, prolong the fight, and attacks you by… running into you. I don’t know who thought that was interesting design, both from a gameplay and a visual standpoint, but seriously?

A “bonus” boss that gives no real rewards and is stupid because he barely does any damage and is just a fear spamming health bar (and yes it’s pretty easy to dodge, but still – why is this “bonus” boss even there?).

As for the health pools being too high – I don’t really know about that, to be honest. Yes, I said that some mobs are just globs of HP, but I say that because there’s literally no reason to be interested in them for the duration you fight them. When I’m fighting a bandit archer, I seriously don’t give any kittens about them, and I just sigh when they go invulnerable because it feels like a waste of time. In any proper party where you’re actually stacking boons and such, things actually do die quite quickly. The other day I was in a half pug group for CoE, and we cleared each Alpha fight in every path in 1-2 minutes flat (I judge based off of my ele’s Lightning Hammer conjure, 1 minute cooldown – I was at most summoning 2 per fight, if even for the earlier encounters), and this was while we were all poking fun at each other in chat. It was actually a ton of fun.

I think the main thing with most of the health pools is that people just suck in groups. When everyone constantly has 20+ stacks of might, constant vulnerability stacks on the enemy, constant fury, and everyone actually smacking the boss and doing damage, stuff dies pretty dang fast.