Guild Wars 2

Adnul Irongut changes. Seriously the worst designed non-challenge in the game.

Players can challenge the Masters in any order they want. Imagine how many players have given up on this minigame outright because they randomly challenged this guy first.

Luck isn’t a fun mechanic, even for a minigame. We can’t play against Poyaqui until we defeat Adnul Irongut. He is a content gate. His difficulty is blocking the progression of player-driven content. Why does he have so much health? Why is he so random? Why is his ability so spammed?

Such a pain in the kitten . At one point players were willingly and literally cheating to get around him. That should raise some red flags in the design corner. I don’t really care how minor this content is, it’s also a minor fix.

He is possible to defeat. Yes it takes more luck than skill, but it is still possible. Dulfy’s guide was what helped me to get past him, and quite smoothly at that.

I doubt there will ever be changes as it would then devalue the titles and awards of those that had already acquired them. They partially did this with the return of the Queen’s Gauntlet and the faint red circles of Liadri now becoming massively obvious orange circles – and I recall seeing a few forum posts of people being annoyed that the achievements they worked hard for were now easier to do, although partially.

I’m not saying that he’s impossible to beat. I’m saying that he’s unreasonably challenging due to his poor encounter design. He is more difficult to defeat than Poyaqui is.

The big issue is that the skills are character-bound, not account-bound, and that Adnul is such a waste of time. I have no incentive to unlock the skills on my other characters, which reduces the amount of access I have to playing Belcher’s Bluff.

This is a problem not because I’m inconvenienced, but because the circumstances of his encounter are so dependent on luck that the majority of factors pertaining to success or failure vs him are out of my control. It’s a problem because he’s a poorly designed element of the game, has been for 3+ years, and has seen attention only to remove the exploits people used to get around him rather than just face him.

Players have not expressed such an outstanding desire to exploit or work around any of the other masters (or really any other part of the game), only with Adnul. That’s just poor.

Re: devaluing peoples’ titles.

What player 1 does has nothing to do with what player 2 does. This is an online game based on cooperation. “Haves” and “Have-Nots” should not exist here. This isn’t like crafting a legendary weapon or getting a commander tag: both of those are directly proportionate to the amount of effort the player puts into preparing and grinding.

Adnul’s preparations list is highlighted by the phrase, “Be very lucky.” Everything else isn’t even secondary, it’s tertiary. #1 and #2 on the list are, “Hope RNGesus loves you.”

tl;dr
don’t care about 1% of players being sad that more players have their “Special Snowflake” swag

do care about the game being designed well and functioning properly

When Belcher’s bluff was first added 2years ago (not 3+, no idea where you pulled that from) you had to defeat them in a certain order, and Adnul was last, because you need one of the other skills to defeat him.
The NPC follows a pattern in skills and once you pinpoint it he’s easy. Not poorly designed, it was just out of order, Poyaqui used to be harder than him because all he would do is skill spam.
Maybe, try harder?

The only thing I want from HoT is for it to be sold stand – alone from the core game.. but noooooo -_-

Probably should change that title if you’re looking for an actual response.

And yes, it’s irritating that Adnul is the worst of the cheating opponents. But they all cheat. As players, we get one use of a special per bout. The opponents use their ability ad nauseum, so the game is completely unbalanced, even for asymmetric play. It just happens that Adnul’s ability is by far the worst.