Guild Wars 2

I just went to the temple of grenth event, but was dumbfounded trying to connect what was happening to my character to the visuals in the world. I would just suddenly die out of nowhere because there was no visual indicator to for the instant-kill effect, nor for the debuff that causes it. I think the most important effects should have the largest and clearest visual indicators, which currently is not the case.

(Here are the rules of the Grenth event, for those unaware.)You must figure out from the buff and debuff tooltips, that the boss can only be damaged if you are in "grenth's domain", accessible from spots at the side of the room. Meanwhile, Shades run around the room stacking the "corruption" debuff. The debuff says it increases damage taken, which is a lie. In fact, it simply kills you instantly if it reaches 25 stacks.

Trying to deal with this event intelligently, I walk up to the stairs to enter the room, and immediately get 8 stacks of corruption for no apparent reason. I was at least 900 units away from any shade. I move back and wait for it to wear off. Trying again and again, I repeatedly get hit with huge amounts of the corruption debuff from no discernible source the moment I get anywhere near the room.

If you’re going to have a mechanic that instantly kills you, a debuff counter at the bottom of the screen is absolutely not sufficient! This needs to have a very clear visual indicator! Many players in chat had concluded that the instant death was a bug because it seems so arbitrary! Similarly, when the shades apply this debuff to a player, it needs to be very clear how they did it. Simply having a shade do a jiggle from across the room in order to apply this debuff is unacceptable.

This is just one example of ArenaNet’s failure to communicate mechanics clearly and visually though. As a rule, the more important the effect, the larger its visual indicator should be. Unfortunately, unimportant effects such as auto-attacks and the Burning condition have extremely prominent visual effects, while for many bosses, the only indication that they are about to unleash a powerful attack is an unobtrusive animation with no special effects.

I don’t expect ANet to be able to fix all the mistakes they’ve already made. However, PLEASE when designing future content, make sure that the most important things have the biggest and brightest effects, while the least important things have the smallest effects! Important visual cues need to be visible on a target that’s burning, immobilized, glowing, and covered in a rain of fire all at once!

I actually thought the encounter was just buggy. Half the time I just walk into the room and immediately die, along with everyone else present.

Maybe they figured, that with all the particle effects, nobody can see wtf is going on anyway so, chalk it up as a loss and move on to some gemstore designs. O.o

Sorry for being sarcastic, but dungeoneers and temple runners etc have been asking for these changes since launch, but instead we get T3 armor in the gemstore.

We’re all at a loss of words tbh. Well, most have plenty of words. They just don’t have anything that hasn’t been stated before dozens of times.

I agree with this 100% though.

The Corruption debuff has always had a visibility issue to some extent, but this patch has made things worse, as the first post indicates.

The Shades apply the debuff from long range now despite not having any kind of projectile/ranged/aoe animation. I know the debuff can also come from attacking them, but I’ve stood in a corner of the room using no skills at all and watched the debuff stacks accumulate on my character despite being far outside of melee range of the Shades.

On top of that, reaching max corruption now instantly Defeats the character rather than Downing them. This makes the fight considerably harder since you have no chance to recover.

If there was a projectile or aoe field or such, then at least players would have a chance to control the accumulation. But as it is now, it ends up feeling like random death.

I completely agree. Things like this need to be a LOT more obvious to the players. I’ve done Grenth dozens of times and still need to ask questions about how it works. And there are many other examples.

There are lots of monsters with incredibly obvious telegraphed attacks using “charging up” animations, and a lot of those attacks do virtually nothing. Meanwhile we have these ninja attacks/effects that one-shot people, and we have no idea that they are coming.