Guild Wars 2

Hello everyone. I’m here merely to express my positive feedback on the design of the new type of mob that was presented with the recent patch. I’m speaking of the big humanoid watchwork robot that is usually presented as veteran or champion. Not sure many people even bothered noticing him and his design, but I usually pay attention to these details and I can say I really liked how Anet worked on him.

In my opinion, the Twisted Nightmare was a good step toward well designed mob, given the following:

-Attacks have good range variety, being dangerous both in melee and at long distance (specially with the reflection dome it casts)

-Fast attack speed. Usually most mobs won’t use their special abilities right after they’ve just used an auto-attack (a Dredge Oscillator wont use his knock back one second after his auto-attack for example, it’s like he has a global cooldown on everything he does). However, the Twisted Nightmare seems a lot more spammy, with little interrupt of his flow of attacks. Maybe his “internal global cooldown” is a lot shorter than the average mob?

-A large variety of special abilities. Heck, this guy has reflection, grenades, flamethrower, pistol, spinning scythe, knockbacks, knockdowns…

-Apparently he has two forms (starts the fight on all fours, goes to standing position after half health is lost). Need to check it more though.

Not sure if I got everything covered or if there is some wrong detail. That’s mostly from a whole day of observing them after doing the Living Story events.

This is a great change from the predictable, kiteable, burst damage based veteran/champions we see a lot in this game. The fast and varied attacks implies a more cautious approach, his attacks are powerful and frequent but they’re not 1-hit mechanisms and you have a reasonable window of reaction to avoid them. His condition damage is also nothing to laugh at (his burning), which is a good incentive to condition removal. The second phase thing is also nice as it changes the pace of the fight, requiring a different approach.

I personally believe this game needs more enemies like this and the veteran karkas (which are also a favorite of mine). Enemies that encourage a bit more of thought, that forces you to change your playstyle, that have frequent, moderately powerful attacks that can overwhelm your endurance bar, instead of a single extremely powerful attack with a long cooldown.

Did anyone else notice this guy? Have any opnion on him?

I was actually very impressed with the design of this enemy, and I’m glad I’m not the only one who noticed this. This is one of those enemies where you really have to pay attention to be able to fight him since its attacks deal a significant amount of damage going unnoticed without the obvious counters (reflection, condition removal, stop ranged attacking, dodging).

I also like the new twisted nightmares. They do have a change in appearance depending on health. That bubble can be a killer if you are not paying attention/lagged out while at range.

Rainweaver.7302:

I personally believe this game needs more enemies like this and the veteran karkas (which are also a favorite of mine). Enemies that encourage a bit more of thought, that forces you to change your playstyle, that have frequent, moderately powerful attacks that can overwhelm your endurance bar, instead of a single extremely powerful attack with a long cooldown.

Did anyone else notice this guy? Have any opnion on him?

Well I agree with the parts that I’ve removed from the quote. The veteran terrors also nice. Something with an attack worth interrupting that isn’t so far that you need extremely fast reflexes and low ping but still fast enough that you might miss it. It is not always desirable to interrupt it(the confusion attack) either.

However to group the karkas with these is just wrong. The karkas have been an embodiment of nearly everything wrong with mobs in this game.

Khisanth.2948:

However to group the karkas with these is just wrong. The karkas have been an embodiment of nearly everything wrong with mobs in this game.

I’m grouping the veteran karkas in particular, not the crazed karka zergs from southsun events that can easily one-shot you despite how high your toughness is.

The veteran karkas can individually provide a very entertaining and challenging fight. They have a fast attack speed with acceptable damage. A few moments of burst damage where you have a decent amount of time to react (like in their roll attack) Situations where you have to choose between attacking or not (they buff themselves with retaliation quite often), situations where you have to choose between wasting endurance to remove the hatchlings from you or just ignore the hatchlings so you can save your endurance for more dangerous attacks. They are also very mobile, meaning you can’t just sit in front of them pressing buttoms. Finally, they have the two phases mechanism, where in the second phase they’re usually more mobile and aggressive, but takes extra damage and are more vulnerable to crowd control.

Both the veteran karkas and the twisted nightmares offer you a fight where quick decisions matters, without gimmick one-shot mechanics or extremely predictable, linear gameplay, that can easily be trivialized by huge DPS or dodge rolls.

Only thing I found annoying was the flamethrower that instantly stacks like 20 seconds of burning on you.

Would be nice if it was an actual flamethrower that took 1-2 seconds to get off so it was avoidable lol, my only complaint.

It’s hard to see all the unique attacks they have though since we’re basically in the middle of a fireworks display.

Rainweaver.7302:

Khisanth.2948:

However to group the karkas with these is just wrong. The karkas have been an embodiment of nearly everything wrong with mobs in this game.

I’m grouping the veteran karkas in particular, not the crazed karka zergs from southsun events that can easily one-shot you despite how high your toughness is.

The veteran karkas can individually provide a very entertaining and challenging fight. They have a fast attack speed with acceptable damage. A few moments of burst damage where you have a decent amount of time to react (like in their roll attack) Situations where you have to choose between attacking or not (they buff themselves with retaliation quite often), situations where you have to choose between wasting endurance to remove the hatchlings from you or just ignore the hatchlings so you can save your endurance for more dangerous attacks. They are also very mobile, meaning you can’t just sit in front of them pressing buttoms. Finally, they have the two phases mechanism, where in the second phase they’re usually more mobile and aggressive, but takes extra damage and are more vulnerable to crowd control.

Both the veteran karkas and the twisted nightmares offer you a fight where quick decisions matters, without gimmick one-shot mechanics or extremely predictable, linear gameplay, that can easily be trivialized by huge DPS or dodge rolls.

Yeah, so much of these nice designs go to waste (even the amazing art design goes wasted) because of the zerging. Anet really needs to try and limit the amount of zergplay that happens so more of this is actually seen, and more strategy is required to fight them.

You can literally afk and auto attack everything, which is sad, and the particle spam covers up their models (which makes animation telegraphing fail), and hides the awesome design.