Guild Wars 2

First of all, could we please have a challenge/retry mote for the first combat scene of story stage “Shining Blade Secrets”, LS3EP6, the one for achievements ‘Precision Blade’ and ‘Hold the Line’?

It is utterly painful to be forced to sit through 5 minutes of dialogue and cutscene for every retrial.

Secondarily, based on the community feedback, the achievement is basically a AoE-DPS check. The problem is, that some classes inherently do not have the chance at all to make it.

Take mesmer for example, the class ranking at the very bottom on [qT]‘s benchmark (http://qtfy.eu/benchmarks/). The condition DPS listed is for single target, and the direct DPS listed is with full boons in raid scenario. In a solo instance, a mesmer can at best clear 3 waves before shadow escapes and that’s pretty much it.

This brings up some questions on design philosophy:

Is the achievement arguably class-specific?

If yes, then, should achievements ever be class-specific? To answer this question, one needs to ask:

If the achievement is de facto class-specific, could it be arguably regarded as punishing players for picking the ‘wrong’ class from the head start?

And, If the achievement is de facto class-specific, does it implies that the game is not following through the statement that players can do anything with any class, the groundbreaking class design philosophy when it was announced back by 2012? Or in another word, balancing is not kept. And if this is true and difficult to improve in near future, which is totally understandable, then doesn’t it make the idea of setting an achievement based on AoE DPS, despite knowing that some classes might not be able to achieve it at all, fundamentally flawed?

That’s what I could think of so far. Thanks for looking into this!

Edit: I am aware of that one is possible to lure Countess Anise/Kiera to tank and kill the mobs without getting yourself into combat since Anise is unable to be downed, and this could serve as an alternative approach to complete the achievement for people running classes that could be arguably impossible to complete the achievement the way developers intend.

However, I believe the frame should be kept within intended gameplay when discussing on design philosophy.

If the achievement is best solved and seemingly only to be solved by meeting enough AoE DPS with few to none alternatives, I believe it could be arguably regarded as the intended gameplay by developers? And if some classes is by design utterly difficult to impossible to get the achievement the intended way, I’d argue that it could be flawed.

There aren’t any classes for which the achievement is impossible, although there might be some builds that aren’t well-suited for it. QTFY’s list is for optimum builds, not “best” and not “only these builds work.” There are plenty of great builds that are sub-optimal and are better choices for some people, depending on playstyle.

In this case, I found mesmer was easier for me than other classes were, despite the low QTFY rank.

When it comes to DPS, qtfy is a good indicator, as contrary to the ‘sub-optimal’ ones in terms of DPS you mentioned. Though I’m, and certainly was in the original post, neither saying that qtfy is the only approach, nor that I went with qtfy build brainlessly. So you might really want to take your build variety advocacy elsewhere.

Secondarily, ‘easier ’ in terms of? The time spent? The rotation and reaction needed to complete the task? The gear acquisition? What was the exact approach? There’s no point throwing an overgeneralized baseless comment stating that ‘hey I did it with ease’ to argue that an issue does not exist at all.

That Dps seems to be percentage based rather than damage based..

I took my most tankiest character in that instance.. a character I’ve regularly used to solo all sorts of powerful enemies even dungeons and fractals and it got utterly ripped apart in seconds..

Not even raid bosses and T4 fractal bosses have been able to do that much damage to it that quickly.. it was absurd how much damage that AoE did.. if it was just raw damage my glass Ranger would have been obliterated in one attack..

Oh I still need to go and do that achievement :/