Guild Wars 2

Now, I have no numbers to back this up. I’m no dataminer, and I can’t actually see the real stats, but in my eyes the effect is pretty obvious.

Enemy mobs were weakened at low-mid levels to adjust for players having fewer trait points and thus fewer stats from traits. Friendly NPCs were not.

This has little effect out there in open world, but in Personal Story missions it is immediately obvious. Almost every mission i go into on my alt, the allied NPCs can kill every mob with minimal assistance from me. Defend the Durmand Priory was a joke, as every mob including the final boss was steamrolled by horde of Priory Arcanists, with zero input from me required. I’m now doing level 65 missions on by level 55 thief and the allied NPCs win them for me.

Can anybody else get hard proof/data to confirm or deny this phenomenon so we can get anet moving on this? It really screws up the feel of the entire personal story when it feels like the player character is largely superfluous.

Edit. Changed the title to grab Anet attention

Azrael.4960:

Sounds like things working as intended. You’re supposed to be relegated to a minor role since this is Trahearne’s story not yours

LOLz…. love it XD

True facts.

All joking aside tho, we don’t exactly want to make the personal story even worse do we? lets keep this on topic.

Finally this has been fixed and I can be a commander. NPC’s attack! For Trahearne! For Trinity!

Oops.

Edit: All joking aside I really never felt like a “commander”.

Rouven.7409:

Finally this has been fixed and I can be a commander. NPC’s attack! stack! For Trahearne! For Trinity!

Oops.

Edit: All joking aside I really never felt like a “commander”.

I corrected that for you.

Joking aside. It wouldn’t surprise me for Anet to overlook this aspect. There’ll probably be a ninja update at some point to sort this out.

The most imbalanced NPC in the game is a toss up between Sieran and Owain. Though I’m pretty sure that Owain being completely off her rocker makes her win hands down.

>.>

Azrael.4960:

Rouven.7409:

Finally this has been fixed and I can be a commander. NPC’s attack! stack! For Trahearne! For Trinity!

Oops.

Edit: All joking aside I really never felt like a “commander”.

I corrected that for you.

Joking aside. It wouldn’t surprise me for Anet to overlook this aspect. There’ll probably be a ninja update at some point to sort this out.

TBH it wouldn’t surprise me if Anet never figured this out. The chances that they have people going back and retesting personal story missions for balance rather than blocking bugs are kind of abysmal.

NPCs are still garbage in most cases and die really quickly, with crappy AI as always.
I seriously don’t see what part of NPC being OP.

I take NPC as a liability than help because they tend to argo lots of foes, tend to argo boss away from stacking point, and etc.

I’m glad/wish that NPCs in the open world would be tougher than they currently are, so that I don’t feel like I wasted my time getting them back on their feet just to watch a single mob take them down again.

I’d highly recommend you read the original post. This is about the personal story allies not having their stats reduced after the trait rebalancing, and thus walking all over the personal story enemies, which were nerfed. Go play a midgame personal story on any alts you might have, its immediately obvious.

I’m fine with them being able to take care of themselves. When it came to the personal story I always felt more like I had kids to babysit, rather than allies to accompany me.

I know this is sorta off topic but I had to add it. Its not just personal story where odd encounters are happening, like what has been stated above. Earlier today I was in Brisban and decided to join in on one of those Toxic Offshoot events where you protect the siege engineers. Funny thing was… I never had to defend a kitten thing. Seriously. I sat and watched, even held a one sided conversation with one of the siege engineer NPCs, while we watched the toxic enemies getting their kitten handed to them by jungle wurms.

That’s right, I was cheering for jungle wurms and they beat the event on their own. Jungle wurms make for OP allies? Was pretty pathetic.

If that’s the storyline where the Risen are attacking the Priory, you get the special weapon to clear the lab and then fight the “big boss” then, no, the new balance change didn’t make it a cake walk, it already was from the start. Having 14 toons, all but 2 prior to the patch.

I don’t think it was intended to be all that difficult. Everything except for a few cases, after Claw Island are almost cinematic story missions. There’s very little challenge or needs. Most you can just outright skip combat.

Here is sort of the ideal I would like to see – and I’m not sure how translatable it is. Remember how they said they don’t want to tell us, but instead show us? The example was the centaurs attacking.

So, while I would indeed like to be a part of a group that knows what it’s doing, and I would love my NPC companions to be competent, meaning let them kill the mobs left and right (there could always be more spawns) – but down the center lane, there is big daddy. He’s mine. He already killed 20 of my men.

The Battle of Claw Island had a little bit of that feel.

Some npcs are so weak, for example dungeon allies. They don’t even do real damage and die very fast.