Guild Wars 2

This is the change I do not understand.

Personal Story -> is not very difficult.
PvE in general and Dynamic Events -> extremally easy -> I never experienced DE fail.
Dungeon Story -> Hard with very poor players, Easy with decent players.

I expected to have at least one part of the game that is hard:
Dungeons Explorable mode.

Unfortunately there are several issues:
1) Downscaling doesn’t work. Maybe AC Explorable is hard, when you go there with 5 lvl 35, but not anymore with 5×80 with full exotic gear.
2) Boss encounters sometimes have specific mechanics -> For example Ghost Eater in AC has cannons that you can use. Actually the strategy is to not use the cannons as these are useless compared to what your party can do. It doesn’t feel right.

I expect that it is not possible to beat a challenge without developing and executing correct strategy. For example: I really like the encounter in the 1st path of AC Explo, with the burrows. It was not possible to do without firstly developing a strategy, without noticing how the encounter works. Speed clearing burrows doesn’t work there.

So overally I have a feeling that the dungeons need to be harder in their explorable versions. It shouldn’t be possible to do with unorganized random group. The game needs to have a hard content for experienced, organized groups of players. I’m really dissapointed that ppl are able to do Arah, only couple of weeks after game release.

And now I read in patch notes, that 2 of the dungeons got nerfed. My question is: why? What was the reason?

RakaNishoo.6071:

And now I read in patch notes, that 2 of the dungeons got nerfed. My question is: why? What was the reason?

No idea about the CoF change but the Change in CoE doesn’t really make it easier, just faster. The boss only has less health, which means the fight now takes (?)10 minutes instead of 30. If you can’t dodge you’re still going to fail.

As for the rest of your post, making dungeons completion only possible with organized groups will just feed elitism, which, I think, we can all agree on, is a bad thing.

Erm… Ok, I wasn’t in CoE, and of course without details we can’t say if it makes the dungeon easier or not. Decreasing boss hp from 1mln to 999 000 doesn’t make it easier. But personally I doubt any fight with a boss lasted 30 mins.

Example with AC→ When you are lvl 35 and don’t have exotic armor and weapon, you deal 20% of dmg you could do with full exotic. This means that for you, the mobs have more HP. It doesn’t only make AC slower, it makes it much harder, because before you are able to doeal enough damage, all your defensive abilities and your stamina will deplete, which means you will die. It will encourage you to use conditions like cripple/chill/weakness on your opponents as well as bring some tactics to the fight so that you can better control the mobs.

At lvl 80, you need to bring 5x DPS character that will kill the mob before it has a chance to strike.

I’m afraid that CoE change promotes 5xDPS builds over the balanced builds and that it is a change that makes the dungeon facerollable/farmable.

As for the rest of my post → I base on GW1 which had a hard content in it. After ppl did the hard content → Developers release hard mode → even harder content.

Some ppl, me including don’t want to farm dungeons. I would like to fail the dungeon 100 times, only to learn how to do it, and do it on my 101 run and earn the reward. Without any challenging content game becomes boring grind.

I don’t mean that only few players should be able to beat dungeons → which would be a bad thing. I mean that if a player wants to bead the dungoen he must:
1) Learn each encounter
2) Develop or read on wiki → the strategy on how to beat that encounter
3) Synchronize his profession build with others and prepare
4) Perform his role during the encounter without making big mistakes. Probably this needs some practice before executed correctly by all players.

I don’t think this list is too much for a casual player. You have a proof in the Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls series which are very hard but also very succesfull games.

OP, im not sure if you have ever tried the last boss in cof path 1 (the only part of cof that was ‘nerfed’ in the latest patch) but before this patch it was only do- able with a certain combo of professions, and was apparently confirmed to be a bugged encounter.

yes it was do able before hand, i have killed him at least twice but that is with using a profession that keeps up poison 100% of the time to reduce the amount of healing the crystals do and also with someone like a GS warrior stacking vulnerability. you needed some pretty good dps to kill the boss. now i can’t talk on the difficulty of this particular boss since the patch hit as i haven’t been into CoF yet.

i haven’t even stepped foot into CoE yet, but from what i heard there was quite alot of trash mobs in that dungeon, so a reduction in health and armour on creatures and bosses would be a welcome change to clear the dungeon quicker if there is truly alot of trash mobs.

We tried COE today, we certainly complete it faster, but still take a while to complete and still need to dodge and stuff as mob dmg is still the same. (I think Alpha is tuned down a bit on his skill usage). At least it wasn’t as tedious as before, fighting and dodging the same boss for half hour is really boring

@Moses → I didn’t try the boss in CoF. I’m writing for a firend that can’t log in here.

Here is how we view things (maybe I make some errors due to not trying that boss):
1) The boss has a strategy → part of group needs to destroy crystals that heal him
2) Ppl don’t want a strategy → they want faceroll/fast farm. So they take certain group (Poison dealer, vulnerability dealer, might stacker, dps dps dps dps)

Therefore, ppl found a hole in the system and are abusing it instead overcoming the challenge. Arena Net → instead of give the buff to the boss so that destroying the crystals is mandatory, makes the boss easier to deal, therefore further encouraging to bypass any strategy and promoting brainless DPS.

If that is true, then I don’t understand it.

That would be true if the “destroy crystals” strategy worked but it didn’t, they kept spawning too kittening fast and the 2/3 guys that were supposed to hit on the boss couldn’t do kitten to his life bar as he healed too freaking fast.

That and you don’t know what are the changes to this encounter.

“Reduced difficulty of the Searing Effigy.”
Maybe they changed it in some way that will encourage players to adapt to the real strategy.

Searing Effigy:

I dont get why they changed him .. a really easy boss with a decent team.
All we did was full dmg on the boss till 60% then kitt him in a corner of the room and hit him till 30% (from 60till 30% he did not get healed at all ;D )
then the last 30% again dmg on boss and everyone should activate something for stability and boom – Boss down!

Only the last 30% were challenging to make him even more easy the dungeon could end up as the next speed run ; )

“As for the rest of my post ? I base on GW1 which had a hard content in it. After ppl did the hard content ? Developers release hard mode ? even harder content.”

GW1 content wasn’t hard, really. GW has had only 2 hard things in the past 5 years (This and this), both of which have been made easier.

There are a lot of people discussing this who havent set foot inside the dungeons that were changed. So please dont talk about them. :/

The change to the effigy was needed simply because the best way to deal with him was to ignore his mechanic entirely. The nerf as far as I know, should be to the crystals, which will encourage teams to actually follow the mechanic. Now, the previous strategy may still work, but it did require a very specific party makeup, which means if Anet was successful with this patch, people wont feel the incentive to do it anymore.

As for CoE the problem was really that it took too long compared to how much fun you got out of it. Fighting the same boss for 20 minutes is generally not fun times. Especially when you have to fight that boss 3 times. Per path. For 9 times in total if you want to 100% the dungeon. More if you want the gear. Alpha is still one of the harder fights in the game, he’s simply not longer tedious. The difference in skill between taking 10 minutes or 20 minutes to kill him is negligible, especially if you’re zerging it like most PuGs do.