Guild Wars 2

Creeper.9360:

What made monsters in Guild Wars 1 more interesting was that they were in groups and they had synergy together along with group tactics. If you took them as individuals they would be just as mundane as it is in Guild Wars 2.

I prefer squad based games in large part because they can make more interesting encounters with it.

Even alone, many of them were equal to 2-3 gw2 monsters. Karka are an exception but find one GW2 monster that can come close to an hydra in GW1 ?

Aigleborgne.2981:

Creeper.9360:

What made monsters in Guild Wars 1 more interesting was that they were in groups and they had synergy together along with group tactics. If you took them as individuals they would be just as mundane as it is in Guild Wars 2.

I prefer squad based games in large part because they can make more interesting encounters with it.

Even alone, many of them were equal to 2-3 gw2 monsters. Karka are an exception but find one GW2 monster that can come close to an hydra in GW1 ?

I didn’t find the hydra that tough. They had meteor and that’s it. Nothing else they did remotely mattered. Not to me anyway. Sure if you got a bunch of them, the meteors would hurt. So you didn’t get a bunch of them. You took them one, two at a time. Actually even three wasn’t that hard to deal with.

It might well have been different when the game launched, but when I played it hydras were no big deal even in hard mode.

Vayne.8563:

Aigleborgne.2981:

Creeper.9360:

What made monsters in Guild Wars 1 more interesting was that they were in groups and they had synergy together along with group tactics. If you took them as individuals they would be just as mundane as it is in Guild Wars 2.

I prefer squad based games in large part because they can make more interesting encounters with it.

Even alone, many of them were equal to 2-3 gw2 monsters. Karka are an exception but find one GW2 monster that can come close to an hydra in GW1 ?

I didn’t find the hydra that tough. They had meteor and that’s it. Nothing else they did remotely mattered. Not to me anyway. Sure if you got a bunch of them, the meteors would hurt. So you didn’t get a bunch of them. You took them one, two at a time. Actually even three wasn’t that hard to deal with.

It might well have been different when the game launched, but when I played it hydras were no big deal even in hard mode.

Even at release I was solo farming them easily, I don’t get how anyone might’ve had problems with Hydras in GW1. Hydras have only one skill to watch out for and it has a huge casting time, of course without any kind of protection and/or interrupts they could easily kill you, much like Karka without projectile reflection.

Vayne.8563:

The problem is, Guild Wars 1 was instanced and Guild Wars 2 is open world. So the more interested stuff has to be in dungeons. You can’t have mixed mobs respawning in the open world, no matter what players want, because far more players will be annoyed by it than players who want it.

Take a look at the krait. Anet made the krait harder and afterwards people complained. Look at AC. Anet made the dungeon harder and people stopped running it.

In an instanced game, you could make stuff hard, because first of all, no one was ever alone. You had henchmen with you and later heroes. And so you always fought in a group against groups.

You can’t really give everyone five or six henchmen in the open world, because if you do, you could end up with 12 guys together and you have an army of sixty. It wouldn’t work. You can’t have different professions healing each other in the open world, because one guy might not be able to do much against that, and how is that fair to him. Maybe someone plays at 3 am and there’s no one around. You were never alone in Guild Wars 1.

Guild Wars 1, in the later years, was far easier than Guild Wars 2 is now. It was complete yawn mode. People don’t remember, but things usually appeared in the same place. You pretty much knew exactly there this group was going to be and pretty much knew exactly how to tackle it.

Sure there were challenging runs in Guild Wars 1 (like the Droks run). Except it’s not challenging at all with a full party once you know it and have the right build. It’s only fun/challenging with a smaller party. You’ve changed the rules of the game.

So do the same thing here. Test yourself. Take off half your armor and then try the Cursed Shore. Try to solo a veteran karka. Try to run the Grawl tunnel in Frostgorge.

The last many years of Guild Wars 1, the game was so easy as to be unplayable. Those who fondly remember the Droks run, or the hydras in the crystal desert, are remembering a point in time.

Very often there are harder creatures and groups in dungeons in this game…but people don’t want to run the hard paths. They’d much rather repeat CoF path 1.

I don’t think you have any idea of what you’re saying.

Firstly, content became irrelevant in Guild Wars because more and more skills were introduced into the skill pool as expansions came out. This meant that more efficient builds were found and eventually, many areas became faceroll easy. It also did not help that players can select two classes. From a balancing perspective, this is a nightmare, and that’s why invincitanks and other forms of super players existed.

Instancing has absolutely nothing to do with game design and combat mechanics. With the correct implementation, the old Guild Wars skill system could have been used in Guild Wars 2. Unfortunately, they opted for a simpler system for the sake of having scalability in the open world.

Your argument is that content is too hard, and therefore people will stop playing it. This has nothing to do with combat mechanics. Many mobs in Guild Wars had trivial skill sets and could be solo’d by a single character.

The real problem is that with the current system, we have mobs that mostly function the same, are incredibly boring to fight, and are generally avoidable. The fact that ArenaNet decided to those with this slapdash mechanic of creating mobs that have modifiers and not actual player skills is hurting the PvE metagame.

There are so many ways that the original Guild Wars system could have been implemented into Guild Wars 2. In fact, I’d even go as far to say that it would have been in their best interest to do this, as it would make fights more interesting and dynamic. Nothing stopped them from having monster skills in the first game “Spectral Agony anyone?” and I don’t see why Guild Wars 2 should be any different.

dimgl.4786:

Vayne.8563:

The problem is, Guild Wars 1 was instanced and Guild Wars 2 is open world. So the more interested stuff has to be in dungeons. You can’t have mixed mobs respawning in the open world, no matter what players want, because far more players will be annoyed by it than players who want it.

snip

1
Sure there were challenging runs in Guild Wars 1 (like the Droks run). Except it’s not challenging at all with a full party once you know it and have the right build. It’s only fun/challenging with a smaller party. You’ve changed the rules of the game.

So do the same thing here. Test yourself. Take off half your armor and then try the Cursed Shore. Try to solo a veteran karka. Try to run the Grawl tunnel in Frostgorge.

The last many years of Guild Wars 1, the game was so easy as to be unplayable. Those who fondly remember the Droks run, or the hydras in the crystal desert, are remembering a point in time.

Very often there are harder creatures and groups in dungeons in this game…but people don’t want to run the hard paths. They’d much rather repeat CoF path 1.

I don’t think you have any idea of what you’re saying.

Firstly, content became irrelevant in Guild Wars because more and more skills were introduced into the skill pool as expansions came out. This meant that more efficient builds were found and eventually, many areas became faceroll easy. It also did not help that players can select two classes. From a balancing perspective, this is a nightmare, and that’s why invincitanks and other forms of super players existed.

Instancing has absolutely nothing to do with game design and combat mechanics. With the correct implementation, the old Guild Wars skill system could have been used in Guild Wars 2. Unfortunately, they opted for a simpler system for the sake of having scalability in the open world.

Your argument is that content is too hard, and therefore people will stop playing it. This has nothing to do with combat mechanics. Many mobs in Guild Wars had trivial skill sets and could be solo’d by a single character.

The real problem is that with the current system, we have mobs that mostly function the same, are incredibly boring to fight, and are generally avoidable. The fact that ArenaNet decided to those with this slapdash mechanic of creating mobs that have modifiers and not actual player skills is hurting the PvE metagame.

There are so many ways that the original Guild Wars system could have been implemented into Guild Wars 2. In fact, I’d even go as far to say that it would have been in their best interest to do this, as it would make fights more interesting and dynamic. Nothing stopped them from having monster skills in the first game “Spectral Agony anyone?” and I don’t see why Guild Wars 2 should be any different.

I have every idea of what I’m saying. The problem here is that YOU don’t know what I’m saying.

The reason why the game as it stands can’t have mobs the way Guild Wars 1 did is down to the mechanics of the open world, combined with dynamic events.

For example, an event goes up someone wants to get to. This is something that never happened in instanced Guild Wars 1 since everything was for the player. If people couldn’t run by mobs, if they had to stop and fight every mob, and they couldn’t get to the events they wanted in time, they’d feel frustration and get angry. This happened in Rift with people getting knocked off mounts and slowed while trying to run through areas. The playerbase complained until Trion fixed it.

Imagine someone saying the maw is up, people teleport to the waypoint, they get hit by same low level grawl and miss the maw altogether. Yeah, happy player base.

The other problem is the respawn rate, or that creatures respawn at all. In a game like Guild Wars 1, there were no respawns. There were a few hidden creatures that drop, always in the same place and basically mobs that could easily be predicted. But here creatures respawn and the respawn rate, as noted by many people, is often very fast.

Imagine if there were healers here, in this game, and rits and minion masters, and they were all respawning all the time, and some poor solo guy playing off hours had to deal with that. It’s not possible.

You can’t have heroes because of the open world, because if everyone had 7 heroes, the game would lag so badly as to be unplayable. You can’t have a game that you can’t solo the open world because so many people do solo. There’s even a Q&A in the Guild Wars 2 FAQ about soloing.

I’ve yet to see any MMO with particularly interesting encounters in the open world. Most of those encounters are reserved for instances.

Vayne.8563:

dimgl.4786:

Vayne.8563:

The problem is, Guild Wars 1 was instanced and Guild Wars 2 is open world. So the more interested stuff has to be in dungeons. You can’t have mixed mobs respawning in the open world, no matter what players want, because far more players will be annoyed by it than players who want it.

snip

1
Sure there were challenging runs in Guild Wars 1 (like the Droks run). Except it’s not challenging at all with a full party once you know it and have the right build. It’s only fun/challenging with a smaller party. You’ve changed the rules of the game.

So do the same thing here. Test yourself. Take off half your armor and then try the Cursed Shore. Try to solo a veteran karka. Try to run the Grawl tunnel in Frostgorge.

The last many years of Guild Wars 1, the game was so easy as to be unplayable. Those who fondly remember the Droks run, or the hydras in the crystal desert, are remembering a point in time.

Very often there are harder creatures and groups in dungeons in this game…but people don’t want to run the hard paths. They’d much rather repeat CoF path 1.

I don’t think you have any idea of what you’re saying.

Firstly, content became irrelevant in Guild Wars because more and more skills were introduced into the skill pool as expansions came out. This meant that more efficient builds were found and eventually, many areas became faceroll easy. It also did not help that players can select two classes. From a balancing perspective, this is a nightmare, and that’s why invincitanks and other forms of super players existed.

Instancing has absolutely nothing to do with game design and combat mechanics. With the correct implementation, the old Guild Wars skill system could have been used in Guild Wars 2. Unfortunately, they opted for a simpler system for the sake of having scalability in the open world.

Your argument is that content is too hard, and therefore people will stop playing it. This has nothing to do with combat mechanics. Many mobs in Guild Wars had trivial skill sets and could be solo’d by a single character.

The real problem is that with the current system, we have mobs that mostly function the same, are incredibly boring to fight, and are generally avoidable. The fact that ArenaNet decided to those with this slapdash mechanic of creating mobs that have modifiers and not actual player skills is hurting the PvE metagame.

There are so many ways that the original Guild Wars system could have been implemented into Guild Wars 2. In fact, I’d even go as far to say that it would have been in their best interest to do this, as it would make fights more interesting and dynamic. Nothing stopped them from having monster skills in the first game “Spectral Agony anyone?” and I don’t see why Guild Wars 2 should be any different.

I have every idea of what I’m saying. The problem here is that YOU don’t know what I’m saying.

The reason why the game as it stands can’t have mobs the way Guild Wars 1 did is down to the mechanics of the open world, combined with dynamic events.

For example, an event goes up someone wants to get to. This is something that never happened in instanced Guild Wars 1 since everything was for the player. If people couldn’t run by mobs, if they had to stop and fight every mob, and they couldn’t get to the events they wanted in time, they’d feel frustration and get angry. This happened in Rift with people getting knocked off mounts and slowed while trying to run through areas. The playerbase complained until Trion fixed it.

Imagine someone saying the maw is up, people teleport to the waypoint, they get hit by same low level grawl and miss the maw altogether. Yeah, happy player base.

The other problem is the respawn rate, or that creatures respawn at all. In a game like Guild Wars 1, there were no respawns. There were a few hidden creatures that drop, always in the same place and basically mobs that could easily be predicted. But here creatures respawn and the respawn rate, as noted by many people, is often very fast.

Imagine if there were healers here, in this game, and rits and minion masters, and they were all respawning all the time, and some poor solo guy playing off hours had to deal with that. It’s not possible.

You can’t have heroes because of the open world, because if everyone had 7 heroes, the game would lag so badly as to be unplayable. You can’t have a game that you can’t solo the open world because so many people do solo. There’s even a Q&A in the Guild Wars 2 FAQ about soloing.

I’ve yet to see any MMO with particularly interesting encounters in the open world. Most of those encounters are reserved for instances.

Again, I’m not sure why you’re talking about respawn rates and think that players would need heroes if Guild Wars 2 had the old skill system… Your post is blowing my mind.

@dimgl

A lot of people in this thread have talked about how monster groups were varied and supported each other. So if you have a couple of healers lets say and they could heal each other (think of Mungri magic box and the dredge healer usually found with him), that group would be massively hard to solo. You couldn’t damge the first healer, because mungri is healing him. You couldn’t damage Mungri because the second healer is healing him. You can’t damage anything else because 1 guy can’t do enough damage. Maybe one guy build just for interupts could get lucky but then you’d have to have every character be replete with interupts.

There were enough combinations in Guild Wars 1 that you could be only because you had a party of people. You had an interupter, you had a healer, you had a damage mitigation guy, you had a minion master, you had a spirit spammer. That was how a lot of Guild Wars 1 played. You basically had your own personal zerg against whatever you were fighting.

Guild Wars 2 doesn’t play like this. I don’t see why this is blowing your mind.

Compared to GW1 NPCs, the GW2 NPCs are pretty darn stupid. :-\ This goes triple for pets compared to GW1 Heroes. The heroes weren’t the brightest bulbs, don’t get me wrong, but they look like geniuses in comparison to my turrets or a necro’s flesh golem >_>

Not sure what happened to the devs between 1 and 2, but their AI design has kinda gotten lax lately.

You wanna know something IRRITATING ??

The Guild Wars (1) AI for interrupting. They know when, what and how to really make you angry.

Oh I’m gonna cast Ray of Judgement!! NAHHHHHHH Let’s just Cry of Frustration you! #!%!#!

Oh I’ll cast Savannah Heat!! NOPE! Let’s use POWER SPIKE!

What about Word of He——?? INTERRUPTED!!!

So, is this thread really just a thinly veiled call for the trinity again? Or are there actual suggestions for improving the mobs within the framework of guildwars 2? I have to agree with some others here that you can’t compare GW1 mobs with GW2 mobs. I like the mob encounters in GW1 too but, as some have already said, all combat areas were instanced and that (along with the gw1 trinity) affected how Anet designed mob placement as well. GW2 being open world has totally different challenges to the extent that saying you can simply transpose that design concept onto an open world is silly. If anyone would like to argue how to make mobs more challenging (which is what I think people are clamoring for) within the current framework of GW2 design philosophy, I think we can move in the right direction. But just remember, GW1 was balanced for 8 people max in most areas.

Aigleborgne.2981:

Hey,

What you do think of GW2 monsters compare to GW1 ?
Personally, I miss GW1 monsters, they were a lot more interesting because they had all player skills (including elite!!):
Hydra with meteor (shower)
Moss scarab with vampiric touch
Wind Rider wih degen and interrupt (killed me so many times)
And mixed group of monsters with deadly combination of interrupt, damage, hexes, …

There were many areas where I was cautious to walk because I feared those monsters (crystal desert with mercenaries, not heroes). I could be stressed when 2 more hydras joined an already very difficult fights.

Now, what’s about GW2 monsters? Seriously, most of them are a joke. Some might have some skills, they are still doing pathetic damage or effect compared to what player can do to them. I think it is one of the main reason open world is so easy and not so interesting. Monsters are not impressive.
Except champions, but they are boring because all they do is massive damage with massive health. It was more fun and challenging to fight huge mixed groups in GW1
(like the ones in DoA).

Plus, it is so easy to disengage from combat in GW2. I can run accross most areas, aggroing all monsters in the way, and still survive. Try doing that in GW1 ! (even a run like droknar requires lot of pratice).
Why was it difficult? Because monsters had skills: they slow you down, stun, knockback, and some of them do high damage.

Here, you just dodge from time to time and run like if nobody coukd kill you, and most of the time, nobody will.

Well, this is one of the reason I got bored with GW2. “you want challenge? play dungeon or fractal !”. But it doesn’t change anything, monsters do more damage, have more health, they still don’t do anything special.
Numbers is a compensation, you will usually fight multiple opponents but as most professions have area of effect damage and survival skills, you are far from gw1 difficulty.
And if you play in group (after all, it is a mmo), it becomes a race at who will land a hit before that monster falls. Because yes, things die so fast it isn’t even funny.

Gw1 enemies were not any deeper than gw2 enemies, they just had more of them at once. Also the amount of skills they used and what not changed with how far in you were, and hard mode; to be honest, they set the difficulty on gw2 pretty low, in fact they nerfed the difficulty, and when they do make enemies more difficult, people dont tend to like it. look at krait, repeated Orr nerfs, and gravelings.
The real truth is people dont want diffuclty, and lets be honest GW1 with many party builds was not difficult at all, i could literally let the party fight for me most times, even in the hench times.

Now im not saying they couldnt make gw2 more difficult, or shouldnt, im just saying it really isnt that much easier than gw1 and even if they did make monsters have more dangerous skills, people would complain, as has already happened numerous times, and the enemies would get nerfed.

Essentially the game needs some iteration of hard mode, though they probably are afraid of separating the playerbase.

dimgl.4786:

I don’t think you have any idea of what you’re saying.

Firstly, content became irrelevant in Guild Wars because more and more skills were introduced into the skill pool as expansions came out. This meant that more efficient builds were found and eventually, many areas became faceroll easy. It also did not help that players can select two classes. From a balancing perspective, this is a nightmare, and that’s why invincitanks and other forms of super players existed.

Instancing has absolutely nothing to do with game design and combat mechanics. With the correct implementation, the old Guild Wars skill system could have been used in Guild Wars 2. Unfortunately, they opted for a simpler system for the sake of having scalability in the open world.

Your argument is that content is too hard, and therefore people will stop playing it. This has nothing to do with combat mechanics. Many mobs in Guild Wars had trivial skill sets and could be solo’d by a single character.

The real problem is that with the current system, we have mobs that mostly function the same, are incredibly boring to fight, and are generally avoidable. The fact that ArenaNet decided to those with this slapdash mechanic of creating mobs that have modifiers and not actual player skills is hurting the PvE metagame.

just want to make this clear again, they at one time gave enemies in GW2 more skills, better control, dazes, knockdowns etc. Players didnt like this because it kicked their kitten Said npcs got nerfed.
all enemies got skill nerf from first beta to the next, they used less skills, less often, and they reduced some of their CC potentials.
Gravelings lost their knockdown/+damage combo.
Story mode COE was greatly nerfed npc skill and dmg wise.
Orr mobs lost many of their CCs, and got lower group densities.

See the problem with this whole discussion, is the truth is GW2 can have difficult varied skill NPCs, in fact they have had this type of thing, and people generally dont like it.
Its not AI designers holding GW2 back, its the fact that people dont want to fight mobs that evade backwards and run away, use knockbacks, and dazes heavy condition damages, and fight a lot of monsters at once (Orr nerf)

The only way to satisfy both sides is for them to create hardmode in some way shape or form. Because the truth is, a LOT of people dont really actually enjoy fighting mobs with difficult mechanics. Sure they say they do, but the minute such content exists, they call it cheesy, and say who designed this or why is this made for certain builds etc.

the vast majority of players are playing gw2 at a very low skill cap.

you know why it seems like many big bosses in dungeons have too much hp? because most parties dont know how to coordinate their offensive buffs for the good of the whole team. IE most parties suck at offensive support

you know why it seems like many monsters do too much dmg? because most parties cant coordinate their defensive buffs, and defensive conditions

You know why it seems like fights are chaotic? because most players dont know when to use their CCs/movement skills (and anet screwed up control a lot with thier implementation of indignant, but thats another story.)

maddoctor.2738:

Even at release I was solo farming them easily, I don’t get how anyone might’ve had problems with Hydras in GW1. Hydras have only one skill to watch out for and it has a huge casting time, of course without any kind of protection and/or interrupts they could easily kill you, much like Karka without projectile reflection.

That was the thing… if you were just running with a party of five henchmen, they didn’t actually react to the meteor cast – they wouldn’t move out of the way, and wouldn’t even cast protective spells most of the time – they just sat there and took it up the backside. This was also before you could order them to move elsewhere without using the leash mechanics (difficult if even possible to pull off effectively in that situation). For that same reason, pulling them rarely worked unless you were very careful, because the henchmen would instantly engage as soon as you did that. So pretty much the only options you had were
1) Try to DPS it into the ground faster than it could get the cast off
2) Bring interrupts (probably the better option)
The chances of this working dropped away exponentially the more hydras you engaged at once, of course.

If you had other people to play with or at least weren’t a monk like I was, it got much easier. Since I didn’t have any way to prot the entire party I pretty much had to either avoid them or take them on one at a time if I absolutely had to.

Why did the trolls in the Guild Wars Universe go from this:

………… to this:

Why did the irukandji go from this:

…….……… to this:

Why are the Krait (Guild Wars 2) a species of snake people like the Naga (Guild Wars 1).

The Krait used to be a species of shape-shifting lizards.

Sirius.4510:

That was the thing… if you were just running with a party of five henchmen, they didn’t actually react to the meteor cast – they wouldn’t move out of the way, and wouldn’t even cast protective spells most of the time – they just sat there and took it up the backside. This was also before you could order them to move elsewhere without using the leash mechanics (difficult if even possible to pull off effectively in that situation). For that same reason, pulling them rarely worked unless you were very careful, because the henchmen would instantly engage as soon as you did that. So pretty much the only options you had were
1) Try to DPS it into the ground faster than it could get the cast off
2) Bring interrupts (probably the better option)
The chances of this working dropped away exponentially the more hydras you engaged at once, of course.

This is exactly what I meant. Meteor wasn’t actually easy to avoid even if you try to run away. Sometimes, it just hit whatever you did.
Protection was good but henchman weren’t really good at it, especially because they started to cast after initial big hit.
With 5 henchies, you had to interrupt and what if you couldn’t? You didn’t pick mesmer primary or secondary?
Even with mesmer primary, it was easy to interrupt first meteor, but since they were usually at least 3, they were 2 more to interrupt and it needed some pratice to do it properly.
Then, fireball hit as hard as meteor but without knockdown.

Even with PUG in the 2 first years, it was really difficult because many players were bad to average.

I now understand that they made GW2 monsters easy and it saddens me. GW1 pve was so much challenging and it could still be completed with some builds but it needed some studies or researchs.

And it’s not all about game difficulty but also diversity, in GW1, you had to adapt your build in some areas. GW2 could have done the same, where players should change their weapon or utilities/elite to succeed in some areas but clearly not the case. One build is enough to do all open-world.