Guild Wars 2

If this comes across as vindictive, then I apologize, for it must be because I’m tired. Tired of the final dungeon, where we ‘fight’ the last boss. Tired of the huge waves of undead, whose main difficulty seems to stem from the fact that they swarm you in large numbers when you’re glued to a cannon. Tired from the ‘sub-bosses’ that have just high health and aren’t challenging in any other way. Tired of being one-shot even though I wear armor and traits stacked with toughness.

Victory Or Death started out pretty well. The first bit where you get the airship parts is nice. The bosses are varied, challenging but doable and it doesn’t take too long. After that comes the air part, and this is where the trouble begins. The airship is pretty cramped, making fighting tough. Fighting the dragon could have been fun, except that you get stuck on a cannon when the undead port in. There’s heaps of them, including veterans, and they down you before you get a chance to react. Destiny’s Edge pretty much decides not to help unless you lure the undead to the waypoint. Downing them all takes a few minutes easily, and to down the dragon, you have to repeat this several times.

After that dragon was finally done (it could really do with less hp to speed up the fight a bit), the ‘difficulty’ was upped by now facing 2 dragons. This meant that the fight simply took twice as long. And we were already pretty much fed up with it the first time. Less health on the mobs wouldn’t change the difficulty per sé, but it would really speed up the fights (making it last less than 45 minutes on your first attempt).

And then came the worst bit: the final fight. For whatever reason the game decided that we hadn’t fought enough mindless waves of thrash mobs, so we got another few. Destiny’s Edge fought with us, thankfully. Still, there’s just too many that take too long to take down, so eventually you run out of dodges and heals, and your teams goes down again. Then the giant laser fires, and a humongeous wave of undead spawns around the three eyes. After taking about 30 minutes of spawn, damage and respawn, we finally managed to get the undead down and the eyes were doable after that.

The boss fight was as uninspired as I’d feared (most of the Traherne complaints are exagerrated, but this unfortunately proved to be true). Pressing 2 while occasionally dodging a shot. If this was supposed to be the boss being ‘downed’ then congratulations, it felt as such. However, the one thing that made me wanna smack my pc through the window was the fact that his attacks also spawned more undead!

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH ALREADY!

I just spent 4 hours mostly fighting thrash mobs. And now I’m wondering: is this supposed to be ‘for casual’ gamers? Sure, you can learn to get better at it. Faster too. But shouldn’t it be doable on your first run? That’s what the story’s meant for right? Fun? Because the problem is that the general difficulty is so high that for players going through things ofr the first time, it’s not fun, it’s frustration.

It’s not fun. It’s frustration. I think that in itself should say enough.

P.S. For those of you who aim to reply with a variation on ‘learn to play’: I can honestly say that I’m in the upper echelon of player skills when it comes to the Elementalist. I can dodge, I can combo, I can switch attunements. I know what I’m doing. However, with these numbers of enemies, it’s pretty much just hack and respawn.