Guild Wars 2

I have been wondering something.

How would you increase difficulty levels in this game?

What I mean is. In dungeons, it seems to be that the standard way ANet makes thing seem more difficult, is to simply make enemies have more hit points. The illusion is that if it takes longer to kill, it’s more difficult.

The problem is, this isn’t true. Take the dragons for example. They’re not at all what I would consider difficult. They just take time. Many players actually Akitten those fights.

In Orr, the trick ANet has used is to have your player constantly bombarded with constrictions or knock downs.

So, if you had to design an event with a final boss encounter, what would be your ideas for making it genuinely difficult?

Let me know if my question isn’t clear, but here is an example. The frog boss in the SAB required the player figuring out a strategy to beat him. In contrast, you can just stand in one place and wail on The Shatterer. One seems difficult, the other doesn’t.

dragons = open pve = casual…

90% players that are more important than few.

Dungeons instead:
Nerf warriors and guardians and suddenly the game becomes difficult

P.S. memorizing patterns and dealing with lag =/= tactic and skill

LordByron.8369:

dragons = open pve = casual…

90% players that are more important than few.

Dungeons instead:
Nerf warriors and guardians and suddenly the game becomes difficult

P.S. memorizing patterns and dealing with lag =/= tactic and skill

Everything has patterns. In the end, there is no skill involved, only muscle brain

To be able to create interesting and varied PvE encounters while maintaining a balance, there is a strong need to normalize certain key values. World of Warcraft is an example of how to do things right, at least in WotLK and Catalcysm (haven’t played MoP). The content developers know how much survivability a non-tank will have. They know (approximately) how much damage a damage dealer will do, and so on. They know that every group should consist of a certain number of damage dealers, tanks and healers. All of that gives them the opportunity to create good challenging PvE content.

In GW2, none of that exists. The GW2 setup works well enough PvP, but it is a nightmare for PvE content developers.

Wildclaw.6073:

To be able to create interesting and varied PvE encounters while maintaining a balance, there is a strong need to normalize certain key values. World of Warcraft is an example of how to do things right, at least in WotLK and Catalcysm (haven’t played MoP). The content developers know how much survivability a non-tank will have. They know (approximately) how much damage a damage dealer will do, and so on. They know that every group should consist of a certain number of damage dealers, tanks and healers. All of that gives them the opportunity to create good challenging PvE content.

In GW2, none of that exists. The GW2 setup works well enough PvP, but it is a nightmare for PvE content developers.

This is why all trinity raid content feels completely contrived to me. It’s not RPG it’s just a puzzle that you solve with rules you already know. Maybe if you could do it once it would be fine, but having to repeat it once you solve it?

Dull as dishwater.

And that’s why they should use on world mechanics. Like canons and other stuff. Now they are bland boring – just like final mission with Zaithan. I don’t even want to go into this alley. The dragon encounters shouldn’t be about spamming dmg aoe and healing aoe, but about dozen of small events. Charging canons, protecting them, maybe distract dragon from the real threat – the mechanics are there. Anet just doesn’t balance them. It’s easier to spam cannon shoots at Claw of Jormag, than actually protect golems with bombs. Why? Because it’s easier to survive in packs and You deal more damage. Dragon fights never should be about 5 minutes standing in place and hitting dragon. It’s so immersion breaking, that it hurts. I remember how hyped I was about Tequila Sunrise in beta – protecting laser canon, hold on waves of undead minions… what it is now? Forget undeads, forget canon, just spam dragon, and open chest.
About smaller events or encounters? Check the big nasty karka rollers. Great idea, good implementation. Can they make fights more interesting and harder without OPing HP points or DMG deal? Sure. But they choose not to, because it’s easier.

I think, the weak classes and skills need a buff. Don’t always nerf the good stuff, buff the bad stuff.
The only class, that is OP and needs a nerf is the warrior. Guardian and Mesmer are not OP they just complement warriors well.

But besides balancing, they should really make boss fights more challenging. At the moment it’s: dodge a big attack every now and then, max out damage to make the fight shorter, because shorter fights means you have to dodge less attackt, which means less opportunities to make a mistake, so more dps = easier fight.

Look at PvP instead (or just open world PvE to a certain extend)
Toughness and vitality actually helps here. The reason is, that you can’t just dodge everything, because there are too many attacks incoming. The hits you take are relatively weak but they are fast. So let some bosses hit faster and weaker.

CC: make more use of CC. At the moment pretty much everything is defiant. You can’t use pulls, blinds, knockbacks, …
Bjarl the Rampager in CoE does not have defiant, what makes the fight a lot more fun, because you can actually use all your skills, not just pure dps skills. You can use CC to prevent him from getting his armor back and stretch out his “vulnerable” periods. This fight is actually a lot more fn, than most other fights.

Another idea I had is an “enraged” buff for certain bosses. The more DPS a boss receives, the more enraged stacks he gets. Depending on the encounter more enraged could hime him additional toughness and vitality, so double dps does not automatically mean he dies in half the time, but still needs for example 80% the time to kill, pretty much like having DR on ofensive stats. Also enraged could make bosses hit faster, so more dps = harder fight to a point, where you can’t dodge everything anymore and actually need to increase your toughness.
Some boss fights would start with high “enraged” levels, that decrease ove time so the start will be harder. Other bosses would start with no enraged, so they would be vulnerable to high burst damage at the beginning of a fight.

Just a few ideas.

They should do what they did on gw1 and have AI mobs have skill builds just like players.

stayBlind.7849:

They should do what they did on gw1 and have AI mobs have skill builds just like players.

Actually mobs are already using the same skills as players do, if you read the combat log you can see the proper names there. That’s not true for all of them of course, but lots of mobs do. What every mob is missing is a “skill1”. A fast attack, that deals low/moderate damage, all mobs have super slow attack speeds, with high damage, but also, due to their slow speed, are easy to dodge/block/reflect whatever. Mobs need first and foremost faster attacks.

Then make them run out of aoe circles, like in GW1 and finally make them use their skills with some intelligence, currently they are mindlessly using their skills, like those Earth Elementals using their reflect shield when nobody is attacking them with Projectiles.

Instead of raising the hp pools of the standard trash mobs, they should just increase the amount of damage and cc the mobs have. This doesn’t have to be a direct buff to their base damage, but more of like adding stronger, menacing attacks in the skill pools of the mobs. You know, make it so that you actually need to either evade or interrupt the more nasty skills the enemies throw at you. You know, to actually keep aware of your opponent and plan ahead.

As of now, you can pretty much run any dungeon with minimal effort, standing around whacking that Hundred Blades of yours while standing on a blind field. Part of the reason why I’ve almost completely moved to s/tPvP is the lack of actual challenging content in pve. And no, I don’t feel like grinding the same stages in Fractals of the Nerds over and over again.

Gamers are so un-self aware sometimes. The problem with difficulty is what you thought was hard last week might not be hard this week. Do you remember how hard it was the first time you learned to ride a bike? How about how hard it was when the game launched?

For my part I remember playing a thief in Beta, and getting regularly clobbered by normal mobs in Snowden. Now I’m dancing with 5-6 undead, 2 of them vets, and not batting an eyelash. And I’m not even cheesing it with S/P.

No game is ever going to be able to produce difficulty faster than the human mind can adapt to it. What was hard yesterday is cake tomorrow. The thing gamers seem to always forget is there are ways THEY can contribute to the fun/difficulty they experience. Devs have a responsibility to keep changing things up, creating new content, and fixing boring or op professions.

But take some bloody responsibility for your own fun too. If you know doing things a certain way is going to be easy mode, don’t do it that way. There is literally nothing stopping you from:

Playing an underpowered profession or build.
Taking off pieces of your armor until content gets hard.
Aggroing more mobs (limit to this one)
Farming Arah instead of CoF p1
Killing champions/events with too few people/solo

The only content that will ever keep up with a players learning ability is PvP, because there it is human mind vs human mind.

My current personal favorite challenging activity in PvE is to retake the colonade in Malchor’s Leap solo. It’s even tough on my warrior, but it is balls out kitten my thief.

Vayne.8563:

Wildclaw.6073:

To be able to create interesting and varied PvE encounters while maintaining a balance, there is a strong need to normalize certain key values. World of Warcraft is an example of how to do things right, at least in WotLK and Catalcysm (haven’t played MoP). The content developers know how much survivability a non-tank will have. They know (approximately) how much damage a damage dealer will do, and so on. They know that every group should consist of a certain number of damage dealers, tanks and healers. All of that gives them the opportunity to create good challenging PvE content.

In GW2, none of that exists. The GW2 setup works well enough PvP, but it is a nightmare for PvE content developers.

This is why all trinity raid content feels completely contrived to me. It’s not RPG it’s just a puzzle that you solve with rules you already know. Maybe if you could do it once it would be fine, but having to repeat it once you solve it?

Dull as dishwater.

It must be guild jumping puzzle!

I’ve said this before, Bosses should ramp up damage/speed of attack/retribution stat proportionate to the amount of DPS they are taking. This would mean your going to find it very hard to run a full DPS team without throttling your damage as you will not be able to cope with the amount of damage coming back. And teams will become much more balanced as to do a really fast clear you will need to get the perfect balance between DPS and being healed through the retaliation from the boss by your support.

At the moment there is no DR at all at taking a full team set up for full DPS, and doing so lowers the amount of damage coming back as the fight takes less time.

Ratty.5176:

I’ve said this before, Bosses should ramp up damage/speed of attack/retribution stat proportionate to the amount of DPS they are taking. This would mean your going to find it very hard to run a full DPS team without throttling your damage as you will not be able to cope with the amount of damage coming back. And teams will become much more balanced as to do a really fast clear you will need to get the perfect balance between DPS and being healed through the retaliation from the boss by your support.

At the moment there is no DR at all at taking a full team set up for full DPS, and doing so lowers the amount of damage coming back as the fight takes less time.

No, groups still woudn’t need your ranger/engi/necro…..

The other thing we need is more sustained pressure. At the moment so much of the damage comes for heavy telegraphed attacks or large circles you have to dodge. Very little damage is from fast attacks from mobs that spam a lot of small damage ticks.

This causes one of the issues, if you don’t have sustained damage coming in, it means that it’s just a case of dodge and only use heal if you make a mistake, it totally removes the role of support. You don’t need the Ele putting down team healing so the Warrior can survive the waves of spiders attacking while it’s trying to DPS the boss, or so the Warrior can survive some boses flaming aura.

I also feel that it is possible that healing needs a little look at the ratios on. It’s possible that the base heal a lot of the time is too high and the returns for each point you put into healing is too low, making this stat less useful than it should me.

Sovta.4719:

No, groups still woudn’t need your ranger/engi/necro…..

It’s not about making people need any class. It’s about making all classes more viable. One thing most of the perceived weaker classes have is they swap extreme damage for ability to heal and support. While the game makes healing and support less important than DPS, then yes, these classes will always be at the bottom of the field. However if getting that extra X DPS from going with a Warrior over an Engineer, meant your team would be taking significantly more damage on top of losing the healing and support from that Engi, it becomes a much less obvious choice.

It a case of making the choice much more level, rather than making X class necessary.

Basharic.1654:

…..
Playing an underpowered profession or build.
Taking off pieces of your armor until content gets hard.
Aggroing more mobs (limit to this one)
Farming Arah instead of CoF p1
Killing champions/events with too few people/solo

………

Agreed. I have no doubt many of the players who claim the game is too easy also take advantage of every trick to run by mobs, find spots where they avoid damage, over come npcs where being underleveled is not much of a disadvantage because that doesn’t compensate for the awesome stats on exotic and above level gear, and run the same dungeons over and over again. I think there are more posters in this thread than I seem to be able to find willing to run Arah anytime I look.

Imo it’s driven by gold farming. Everyone wants their legendaries and that takes alot of gold. By the time everyone has run their alts thru all the easy runs and done the round robin of the dragons, the night is over lol. The only satisfaction for the night is the gold earned and that suddenly seems like a cheap reward for all the time spent. But, how does one change the need to have so much gold?

As someone who could care less if I have a legendary, my options are wide open. I go back and find the champions who were so tough and solo them if I can. I play parts of the game I have bypassed because I have the time because I don’t run CoF part 1 over an over lol. I run dungeons strange to me. I look for groups that are not in the WvW zerg and those are hard to find lol. Running with inexperienced players is especially challenging.

It’s an interesting player base to be sure. There are a dozen reasons why players say the looks of the legendary staff do not make it desirable, when what they are really saying is that they can’t or won’t get 500 Arah tokens. Is it merely coincidence that the armor and weapons people covet are the ones from the easy dungeons? Or that full sets of exotic Karma gear are less desireable than dungion gear because they take Karma that is otherwise used for legendaries? I don’t think so.

By doing away with a gear grind needed for the best gear, Anet has made the game alot more evenly balanced in terms of player equality. They substituted the legendary grind instead. I am not sure that is any better given the lengths players will go to have one. I for one never imagined how much real money players would spend and how much in game time would be played just to look good in a video game lol. It is a freaking amazing phenom.

maddoctor.2738:

stayBlind.7849:

They should do what they did on gw1 and have AI mobs have skill builds just like players.

Actually mobs are already using the same skills as players do, if you read the combat log you can see the proper names there. That’s not true for all of them of course, but lots of mobs do. What every mob is missing is a “skill1”. A fast attack, that deals low/moderate damage, all mobs have super slow attack speeds, with high damage, but also, due to their slow speed, are easy to dodge/block/reflect whatever. Mobs need first and foremost faster attacks.

Then make them run out of aoe circles, like in GW1 and finally make them use their skills with some intelligence, currently they are mindlessly using their skills, like those Earth Elementals using their reflect shield when nobody is attacking them with Projectiles.

I love this idea. Our self heals are already on a low cool down anyway.

Ritt.3069:

Instead of raising the hp pools of the standard trash mobs, they should just increase the amount of damage and cc the mobs have. This doesn’t have to be a direct buff to their base damage, but more of like adding stronger, menacing attacks in the skill pools of the mobs. You know, make it so that you actually need to either evade or interrupt the more nasty skills the enemies throw at you. You know, to actually keep aware of your opponent and plan ahead.

As of now, you can pretty much run any dungeon with minimal effort, standing around whacking that Hundred Blades of yours while standing on a blind field. Part of the reason why I’ve almost completely moved to s/tPvP is the lack of actual challenging content in pve. And no, I don’t feel like grinding the same stages in Fractals of the Nerds over and over again.

Orr mobs had cc and check out all crying about Orr until they watered it down.

kRiza krimos.1637:

Ritt.3069:

Instead of raising the hp pools of the standard trash mobs, they should just increase the amount of damage and cc the mobs have. This doesn’t have to be a direct buff to their base damage, but more of like adding stronger, menacing attacks in the skill pools of the mobs. You know, make it so that you actually need to either evade or interrupt the more nasty skills the enemies throw at you. You know, to actually keep aware of your opponent and plan ahead.

As of now, you can pretty much run any dungeon with minimal effort, standing around whacking that Hundred Blades of yours while standing on a blind field. Part of the reason why I’ve almost completely moved to s/tPvP is the lack of actual challenging content in pve. And no, I don’t feel like grinding the same stages in Fractals of the Nerds over and over again.

Orr mobs had cc and check out all crying about Orr until they watered it down.

Didn’t Orr have tons of stuns, knockbacks, pulls, that would constantly hinder ones game performance because once you got in over your head you were infinitely locked down?

For me the solution is technically complicated but conceptually simple.

INCREASE MOB AI. Drastically.

1. Give mobs a full set of 10 usable skills, including elite for vets and above
2. Group certain mobs for activation and compliment each other with skills and builds. (example, a player pulls one mob but activates 2-3, each with primary, secondary and tertiary roles, depending on the state of the activated group)
3. Mob combos and clever use of skill fields.
4. Better aggro mechanics, based on active player threat and support potential. Ie, if a player goes down, all mobs who arnt fully aggroed and within certain proximity should focus fire the downed player, simple stuff like that that gives the impression of reactive AI.

Generally up the AI as much as possible. You want mobs acting like players would. Creates a PVE meta and would make trash alot more interesting to fight.

BOSSES MOVEMENT AND POSITIONING. It needs to be clever.

1. Use above rules for bosses aswell, especially encounters with multiple bosses.
2. Give bosses alot of movement potential, make them actively close in and pull out in accordance to skill selection. If a mob heals he should be retreating first, same with support skills. Dont have bosses blindly follow players no matter if the encounter envolves weakening via pulling the boss into something. Bosses should be clever enough that pulling them into that molten lava or electric spike or whatever would actually feel rewarding.

To be honest the bosses are the hardest thing to make interesting mechanically, just because of the lack of a trinity…. However its not impossible.

maddoctor.2738:

stayBlind.7849:

They should do what they did on gw1 and have AI mobs have skill builds just like players.

Actually mobs are already using the same skills as players do, if you read the combat log you can see the proper names there. That’s not true for all of them of course, but lots of mobs do. What every mob is missing is a “skill1”. A fast attack, that deals low/moderate damage, all mobs have super slow attack speeds, with high damage, but also, due to their slow speed, are easy to dodge/block/reflect whatever. Mobs need first and foremost faster attacks.

Then make them run out of aoe circles, like in GW1 and finally make them use their skills with some intelligence, currently they are mindlessly using their skills, like those Earth Elementals using their reflect shield when nobody is attacking them with Projectiles.

Yea, but I haven’t seen this mechanic utilized as well as it was in GW1. Some of the most fun/challenging fights in GW1 for me were when your party ran into a group of AI that had the same class makeup that a player group might have. e.g. two warriors, an AOE elementalist, two monks, and a ranger.

Also, does ANY mob in GW2 have access to elite skills and/or healing skills?

Parlourbeatflex.5970:

For me the solution is technically complicated but conceptually simple.

INCREASE MOB AI. Drastically.

1. Give mobs a full set of 10 usable skills, including elite for vets and above
2. Group certain mobs for activation and compliment each other with skills and builds. (example, a player pulls one mob but activates 2-3, each with primary, secondary and tertiary roles, depending on the state of the activated group)
3. Mob combos and clever use of skill fields.
4. Better aggro mechanics, based on active player threat and support potential. Ie, if a player goes down, all mobs who arnt fully aggroed and within certain proximity should focus fire the downed player, simple stuff like that that gives the impression of reactive AI.

Generally up the AI as much as possible. You want mobs acting like players would. Creates a PVE meta and would make trash alot more interesting to fight.

BOSSES MOVEMENT AND POSITIONING. It needs to be clever.

1. Use above rules for bosses aswell, especially encounters with multiple bosses.
2. Give bosses alot of movement potential, make them actively close in and pull out in accordance to skill selection. If a mob heals he should be retreating first, same with support skills. Dont have bosses blindly follow players no matter if the encounter envolves weakening via pulling the boss into something. Bosses should be clever enough that pulling them into that molten lava or electric spike or whatever would actually feel rewarding.

To be honest the bosses are the hardest thing to make interesting mechanically, just because of the lack of a trinity…. However its not impossible.

Yes! This is how it was done in GW1. I have no idea why they decided to go the MASSIVE HP route with GW2.

Probably something to do with time/money…

GW1 had SOOOOO much more flexibility because you could get heroes to run with you and get much more complex with your/your teams build. Here yes, PvE is very easy.

No Walking.6349:

GW1 had SOOOOO much more flexibility because you could get heroes to run with you and get much more complex with your/your teams build. Here yes, PvE is very easy.

I think the point here was that in GW1 enemies also had team builds in some cases

seriously having a class nerfed or a boss buffed with high hp or damages or even more minions doesn’t add any real difficulty gw2 should focus on a strong and well implemented AI(artificial intelligence) boos should impose the pace of the fights, react to the players and enemies groups should have some kind of formations and move a little more ranged should try to avoid being meleed and and melee should try to lure the opponents to avoid kiting. if the AI is well designed the difficulty will be au rendez vous.