Guild Wars 2

I was just watching a 12 min demo of Dark Souls 2, which is a game where the difficulty is very high, and dodging or blocking therefor makes a big difference. So that made me wonder:

If bosses or mobs in PvE could down you in 2-5 hits, would you spend more time playing open world PvE?

Obviously this would also mean there would have to be some changes. Some professions would need to be able to dodge more then two times, others might need more block or interrupt skills, and mobs would have more or less crowd control. However the basis for a kind of “Dark Souls” gameplay is already there. But would it make a difference?

Edit: I feel I should mention; the idea is not to replicate Dark Souls, but simply to make the difficulty of bosses and mobs in Guild Wars 2, similar to that of Dark Souls. The point would be to bring a sense of danger into the open world, and force you to be mindful of your surroundings. It would also mean that there would be overall less mobs in the world, as counter to the higher difficulty. Which in turn would mean mobs would have to have a higher drop rate as well.

So; higher difficulty (higher damage, but lower attack rate), less mobs, and higher drop rate for each mob.

Some changes I feel is a little bit of an understatement. Alot of the reasons Dark Souls difficulty works is that you can easily see what an enemy is doing and learn the bosses patterns. Any of the open world events dealing with champions or bosses quickly turns into such an explosion of spell effects I have no clue what the boss is even doing.

That’s not to say I wouldn’t welcome a way to increase the open world difficulty. I’m still hopeful for some way to scale our stats lower in the open world, like a variation of GW1’s Hard Mode. Would make the starter zones way more enjoyable when I’m not able to sit and tank just about any event as a mesmer. Really could see it done as either an option on the map screen or on the side bar of the minimap to toggle “Hard Mode” on and off, maybe for a slight Magic Find buff for the zone.

I personally would love it…but I think a lot would have to change in order to facilitate it. You could introduce a standard ‘block’ button and then have skills that block and do something else also but this would change the playstyle of the game completely. You could probably counter the fact that events/fights would take longer by boosting damage but I dont know…lots of tweaking.

Ya no PvE in the souls series isn’t really hard in the first place you watch your enemy’s moves, learn how to use your character properly, and take things slow you will conquer the pve no problem. The pvp is were the difficulty comes in as you never know what your gonna get and if the person will be any good due to how different each player can fight and build their character in that game.

Back to the actual point though is that the pve in guild wars 2 is just set up way to differently. With the focus on open zones and multiple people getting together it just wouldn’t work the same way as the souls series(and tons of other variables i don’t feel like getting into atm as it’s a completely different kind of game).Their are also bosses that already function like this were they practically one or two shot you with a random attack. They need to work on making the fights in the world fun not changing up the combat as the combat itself works out pretty well for a mmo(not taking into mind skills,weapons just how the player moves and attacks). They could also add more depth to the combat so that enemies and players attack with more variety as that seems to be a current problem with the combat.

O ya the fact that open world bosses are mostly stationary kind makes them feel pretty boring plus their mechanics aren’t even threatening. They are pretty much jokes as a fight and should be completely redesigned. I’ve never had an issue with a single one it has been a stand and spam for most of them besides the flame elemental.

A dedicated blocking system were you have to time your blocks along with the dodges would be welcome as it would just make shields feel more useful overall. Instead of this o im blocking attacks for 3 seconds then i can’t do it for 30.

This is a real issue I have with owPvE: difficulty does not scale very well with population.

Personally, I would love if there were enemies that could 2-3 shot people. But when you have 3-5 people with you, it all of a sudden doesn’t matter.

• There need to be enemies that punish autoattacking. 25 stacks of retaliation for 5 secs at 75, 50, and 25% health? Hell yes.
• There needs to be more bosses like, sad to say, the King Frog from the SAB. Force people to engage in active combat instead of standing at 1200-1500 range and pew pewing to win. In the end, everyone enjoys it more.

• Bring in Hard Mode open world (level scaled down by 5, 100% MF added) and fractal elements to dungeons.

However, keep this in mind: people may not enjoy a more difficult game…they may simply flock to what ever content is easiest to do.

Thereon.3495:

I personally would love it…but I think a lot would have to change in order to facilitate it. You could introduce a standard ‘block’ button and then have skills that block and do something else also but this would change the playstyle of the game completely. You could probably counter the fact that events/fights would take longer by boosting damage but I dont know…lots of tweaking.

The game already has plenty of ways to “block”. Aegis, blind, daze, fear, knockdown, launch, pull, push, stun, and also partly chill, weakness, or protection. Adding a dedicated block button would really just be overdoing it.

Bosses in dungeons already down you in 2 hits.

Kasama.8941:

I was just watching a 12 min demo of Dark Souls 2, which is a game where the difficulty is very high, and dodging or blocking therefor makes a big difference. So that made me wonder:

If bosses or mobs in PvE could down you in 2-5 hits, would you spend more time playing open world PvE?

Obviously this would also mean there would have to be some changes. Some professions would need to be able to dodge more then two times, others might need more block or interrupt skills, and mobs would have more or less crowd control. However the basis for a kind of “Dark Souls” gameplay is already there. But would it make a difference?

Some bosses were hard at beginning (fire ele) but then this game turned to Nerf Wars.

Vorch.2985:

This is a real issue I have with owPvE: difficulty does not scale very well with population.

Personally, I would love if there were enemies that could 2-3 shot people. But when you have 3-5 people with you, it all of a sudden doesn’t matter.

• There need to be enemies that punish autoattacking. 25 stacks of retaliation for 5 secs at 75, 50, and 25% health? Hell yes.
• There needs to be more bosses like, sad to say, the King Frog from the SAB. Force people to engage in active combat instead of standing at 1200-1500 range and pew pewing to win. In the end, everyone enjoys it more.

• Bring in Hard Mode open world (level scaled down by 5, 100% MF added) and fractal elements to dungeons.

However, keep this in mind: people may not enjoy a more difficult game…they may simply flock to what ever content is easiest to do.

I don’t know that it doesn’t. Personally, I think there are far more people who loves a challenge, then there are people who don’t. Dark Souls popularity is a solid proof of this. Developers really only make easier games, because they fear their player base. They don’t like frustrated players coming up to them, and complaning that their game is ridiculously difficult. But in that frustration, there is also passion and a drive to succeed, which in turn makes dedicated players. These are emotions easy games never can achieve.

The fact that content is easier when you have more people around you, is already a factor. So that would remain the same.

I’d love to see hard challenging battles that doesn’t involve zerging a stationary boss for 5 minutes while getting randomly one shot by an unblockable attack.

Kasama.8941:

Vorch.2985:

This is a real issue I have with owPvE: difficulty does not scale very well with population.

Personally, I would love if there were enemies that could 2-3 shot people. But when you have 3-5 people with you, it all of a sudden doesn’t matter.

• There need to be enemies that punish autoattacking. 25 stacks of retaliation for 5 secs at 75, 50, and 25% health? Hell yes.
• There needs to be more bosses like, sad to say, the King Frog from the SAB. Force people to engage in active combat instead of standing at 1200-1500 range and pew pewing to win. In the end, everyone enjoys it more.

• Bring in Hard Mode open world (level scaled down by 5, 100% MF added) and fractal elements to dungeons.

However, keep this in mind: people may not enjoy a more difficult game…they may simply flock to what ever content is easiest to do.

I don’t know that it doesn’t. Personally, I think there are far more people who loves a challenge, then there are people who don’t. Dark Souls popularity is a solid proof of this. Developers really only make easier games, because they fear their player base. They don’t like frustrated players coming up to them, and complaning that their game is ridiculously difficult. But in that frustration, there is also passion and a drive to succeed, which in turn makes dedicated players. These are emotions easy games never can achieve.

The fact that content is easier when you have more people around you, is already a factor. So that would remain the same.

I disagree with this. Games like Farmville were far more popular than Dark Souls. lol

Dark Souls sold under 3 million copies. Games that are easier, games like Skyrim have sold a lot more.

There are hard core players out there, but I seriously doubt they’re the majority of players.

No, because open world is designed more for casual gameplay.

Here’s a simplified timeline of the problem with difficult open world PvE:
-Monsters are tough to kill, and drop bad loot = Frustrating / Waste of player’s time, not many players will bother going there.
-Give monsters better loot = Rewarding, people will try, but most will ultimately fail because the majority of players isn’t good enough to kill tough monsters.
-People form zergs to farm tough monsters without challenge for the good loot = Bye-bye difficulty, bye-bye rewarding players for skilful gameplay, good loot reduces to merely OK loot due to overfarming.
-Area is nerfed (either by making mobs anti-zerg, lowering rewards, adding harsher DR rules) = People will stop going there, leaving the area dead.

The way I see it, the open world is designed for people to explore the different places, go sight-seeing, collect some materials, join up with some friends and pwn some events.
Keep the difficulty inside dungeons, designed for 5-man parties. Way easier to balance out difficulty and rewards.

Also, there are some bosses that 1-2-shot people (depending on player gear and stats). These bosses are covered by so many by particle effects from the zerg that’s attacking it that it’s impossible to see any attack from them coming. This is not difficult, it’s just boring.

Milennin.4825:

No, because open world is designed more for casual gameplay.

Here’s a simplified timeline of the problem with difficult open world PvE:
-Monsters are tough to kill, and drop bad loot = Frustrating / Waste of player’s time, not many players will bother going there.
-Give monsters better loot = Rewarding, people will try, but most will ultimately fail because the majority of players isn’t good enough to kill tough monsters.
-People form zergs to farm tough monsters without challenge for the good loot = Bye-bye difficulty, bye-bye rewarding players for skilful gameplay, good loot reduces to merely OK loot due to overfarming.
-Area is nerfed (either by making mobs anti-zerg, lowering rewards, adding harsher DR rules) = People will stop going there, leaving the area dead.

The way I see it, the open world is designed for people to explore the different places, go sight-seeing, collect some materials, join up with some friends and pwn some events.
Keep the difficulty inside dungeons, designed for 5-man parties. Way easier to balance out difficulty and rewards.

Also, there are some bosses that 1-2-shot people (depending on player gear and stats). These bosses are covered by so many by particle effects from the zerg that’s attacking it that it’s impossible to see any attack from them coming. This is not difficult, it’s just boring.

Very well said. Agree completely.

Recall that Orr was a pretty miserable place to PVE before the nerf awhile back. Being yanked around, interrupted and swarmed got tired and frustrating really fast. Since the nerf, it has been slowly ramped back up in difficulty and seems like it is at a pretty good place now.

In addition to dungeons, there are still the temple events and some other DEs where difficulty spikes significantly, for ad hoc PVE difficulty challenges.

I’d love if the open world wasnt so faceroll boring.

Imo they should introduce whole areas in the maps that more difficult to tackle to provide content for people that still enjoy a good challenge instead of the optimal path to their points. GW1 had the higher difficulty mode, but I find that ill-suited for a persistant world such as GW2. Instead have caves, canyons or islands that are harder to beat (either more opponents, more veterans, difficult to handle abilities, challenging environment, etc).

Re: keeping it for dungeons/fractals only: thats very scripted content specifically for designed for 5 people. I’d love to play an open world area with 1-2 friends without falling asleep.

Re: Orr was like that. True but Orr wasnt just a side area it was pretty much the whole endgame, and that was the issue. If you let the difficult and easy content exist side by side everyone can pick their prefered meal. Southsun cove has a better difficulty but is very barren and one-dimensional, unfortunately. Lets hope it improves soon.

You can get a semblence of difficulty by facing the content higher level than yourself. Then your attacks start glancing off the enemies and mobs can literally kill you if you let two or more hits get by.

I actually get pretty absorbed into the PvE content while leveling up 5-70 when I just aim to tackle hard stuff. The events scaled to 1-5 players seems pretty good in that case when you’re facing 5-8 levels above and has a good balance of ‘these things can kill me’ and ‘they still die without taking forever’. If you haven’t, I’d suggest giving the open world events a shot at around +8. CC works, conditions work, defenses work, all that good stuff works great compared to things like PvP or Dungeon content where straight damage builds just die or conditions having little impact.

The dynamics of the game work pretty well although I feel elementalist get a bit short-changed in these circumstances as it simply takes them so much more effort to get the same results. The only thing I’d suggest changing for the PvE content is how dynamic level scaling works, with gear and additional options.

Currently, it scales you by your effective level and then expects your gear to compensate for your (lowered) stats. Instead, I think it should just scale back your gear, turning your gear grade to the equivalent grade of that level (so your exotic gear would stay exotic until you get scaled lower than lvl 50 since there is no such gear grade then where it will become rare, until lower than 35 where the highest gear grade then is masterwork, and so on…). So your gear would keep you relevant until you go to an area that surpasses your gear’s level. In essense, a lvl 80 could wear lvl 35 masterwork gear in AC exp and be just as effective. Tri-stat gear would also fall off depending on that grade, so on and so forth.

On top of that, they could either introduce an option to choose your adjusted scaled level. Currently, if you take your level 80 to a lower level zone, you will be scaled to the area +1. That is, in a lvl 45 area, you scale to lvl 46. But with the option to scale it yourself, you can put yourself at lvl 40 or lvl 39 in the same area.

Another option would just be dynamic instance adjustment, where entire zones are adjusted to a certain difficulty. You can introduce a kind of world-meter that affect specific zones and how their levels scale by the enemy factions’ occupation in areas. Do dynamic events (maybe give several different objectives to complete the events with different outcomes) that have a serious impact on the world difficulty.

There’s a lot of ideas I’ve got but I’m probably running close to the limit on this post…

Mastruq.2463:

I’d love if the open world wasnt so faceroll boring.

Imo they should introduce whole areas in the maps that more difficult to tackle to provide content for people that still enjoy a good challenge instead of the optimal path to their points. GW1 had the higher difficulty mode, but I find that ill-suited for a persistant world such as GW2. Instead have caves, canyons or islands that are harder to beat (either more opponents, more veterans, difficult to handle abilities, challenging environment, etc).

Re: keeping it for dungeons/fractals only: thats very scripted content specifically for designed for 5 people. I’d love to play an open world area with 1-2 friends without falling asleep.

Re: Orr was like that. True but Orr wasnt just a side area it was pretty much the whole endgame, and that was the issue. If you let the difficult and easy content exist side by side everyone can pick their prefered meal. Southsun cove has a better difficulty but is very barren and one-dimensional, unfortunately. Lets hope it improves soon.

I agree about Southsun Cove – it seems to have been a failed attempt at creating a more difficult area. The critters are tougher to kill, but that just makes for longer fights, which ends up becoming tedious in its own way.

But if they made the critters more dangerous but they could be killed quickly so that the fights were over rapidly (they die fast or you die fast), then I think the issue would be that a small team of players could probably sweep right through them, resulting in mega-farming.

I don’t know if their game engine allows it, but if they had critters that scaled dynamically in regen & dmg output, for example, based upon the number of attackers, that might mitigate potential farming issues.

I joined Guildwars 2 to play casual, not to challenge myself every step i do, sure i like some challenges in games but not like dark souls 2 or 1, its not fun doing hard content repetitively .. at least to me..

Dante.1508:

I joined Guildwars 2 to play casual, not to challenge myself every step i do, sure i like some challenges in games but not like dark souls 2 or 1, its not fun doing hard content repetitively .. at least to me..

This is a valid point.

Personally, when playing a profession I’m unfamiliar with, I like the content to be easy so I can learn the simplicities of them without scurrying about for my life.

However, one could categorize me as ‘hardcore’ (I’m far from that though) and like to face the content at hardmode…as a casual that likes challenge, my options are to roll an alt and do the content at +x levels above or do/solo dungeons. One requires throwing away progress (that’s bad! for a casual) and the other swings so far in the other direction that not everyone wants that kind of challenge (it’s really team-focused content and if you just want to explore some place for 30 min, why be kitten with making 5-man teams and doing dungeons over and over again?).

I think there’s room for improvement in challenge of open world, but option should be there. Needs more discussion, IMO.

While I love Dark Souls’ difficult gameplay, I don’t think it would work very well in an MMO. I’d love for a Dev team to come out and make one, just to see how it would turn out. Hell even to prove me wrong but I don’t think it would work with GW2’s combat.

A difficult MMO based on Dark Souls gameplay would be da bomb. Only thing that would be different would be keeping PvE and PvP separate, the only thing that I dislike about Dark Souls.

Dante.1508:

I joined Guildwars 2 to play casual, not to challenge myself every step i do, sure i like some challenges in games but not like dark souls 2 or 1, its not fun doing hard content repetitively .. at least to me..

You can play hard content casualy too.

Lupicus feels like a fairly Souls-y boss.

I like challenge sometimes, but on my own schedule. When I want to be challenged, I go do more challenging content. A lot of the time I just want to relax and enjoy the world.

There should be a massively hard zone you could go to, but again the problem is, I don’t think most people would go there, unless the rewards were amazing. And I don’t see that happening.

Get to lvl 80, get armor/weapons lvl 0 (white quality), no traits, no trinkets, no runes.

There is your hardcore mode, enjoy.

I don’t think much/any existing stuff should be suddenly made harder just to be harder, but it’d be nice seeing more difficult stuff added in the future to compliment the easier things that exist.

It use to be like that but ppl said it was too hard to they made it easier for a temp. time. Now they are going back so making things harder and every time ppl do they complain about it. Look at AC even before they changed it ppl complained that it will be too hard and now that AC has been changed ppl complain that they cant do it. Most of the major events will be made harder its just time that most ppl do not see to be able to deal with.

I don’t want harder content. I agree that PvE isn’t really difficult for most people, but those people should understand that there are casual gamers too. And if they don’t like casual gamers, there’s the minority that suffers from whatever physically challenges them to play the game. Colour-blindess or atritis for example.

But if so many people want difficult PvE, maybe Anet should think of implementing a hard-mode of some sorts?

I feel like a few are misunderstanding this. Just because something is difficult, it doesn’t mean you are suddenly forced to play it. Even if open world mobs hit harder, you could still just chose to run past them.

Also, there’s a big difference between difficult, and annoying.

While I understand peoples what/need for more difficult content, it would be difficult for Anet to do this. They would almost have to have a way that you could change a setting on your character to maybe reduce their own stats.

If they where to just up the difficulty in open PvE you would first see a lot of complaints, then you would see a lot of people leave (not good for game).

I find it funny that players will want to have harder overworld enemies and harder dungeon enemies, but in dungeons that have hard enemies they just run past them, calling them trash mobs.

I can’t really take any side of the debate seriously until that contradiction is resolved. However, I do kind of like to push myself, but I don’t want the wandering overworld to be the place to do it.

How about they release expanded the UW and FoW maps from GW1 as level 80 zones for GW2?

That’d be awesome.

You can already go solo dungeons.
If you want intense fight solo Alpha (not first fight) with Warrior.

I am doing 40 plus fractals atm and those are challenging to me. I have played and beaten Demon and Dark souls but I can also say that this would be counter productive to players and the devs. There becomes a point in a game if it is too difficult it becomes tedious. ALTHOUGH there is a perfect line where a game can be challenging yet fun (ala Dark Souls) also but this is hard to create for most devs I think. Looking from Anets shoes they would lose player population quickly and you(OP) would be hard pressed to find other players that could meet the challenge of this harder difficulty.

salameri.3768:

I am doing 40 plus fractals atm and those are challenging to me. I have played and beaten Demon and Dark souls but I can also say that this would be counter productive to players and the devs. There becomes a point in a game if it is too difficult it becomes tedious. ALTHOUGH there is a perfect line where a game can be challenging yet fun (ala Dark Souls) also but this is hard to create for most devs I think. Looking from Anets shoes they would lose player population quickly and you(OP) would be hard pressed to find other players that could meet the challenge of this harder difficulty.

Yea and maybe those 1-2 million that left (not took break) the game would then go back.
Casual just complaint, most of them are not even casual (5+h a day) but can’t learn things like Lupi fight so they hide behind “casual” title. If they really don’t care about FotM, Arah and so why do they complain against some new dungeon or hard zone?

GW2 Bosses with Dark Souls difficulty???………………..YES PLEASE! Man mastering each of the boss fights in Dark Souls was the best part, such a rewarding challenge!

I totally get how some people would want harder PVE content, and I would be in favor of a “hard mode” like GW1 eventually got, but getting 2-shot does not equal fun for me. I play MMO’s to immerse myself in a game world for the purpose of casual, escapist fun, not to pressure myself to develop my twitch skills or die.

Nothing wrong with either preference, mind you, but if PVE content were simply made more difficult for everyone, regardless of preference, I would simply move on to a different game. It just wouldn’t be worth the frustration and would be exactly the opposite of what I’m looking for.

Just chiming in on the topic of Dark Souls, those who haven’t played it seem to consistently have the belief that it is unbelievable hard. This isn’t true, set almost any modern game (be it RTS, FPS, or action RPG) to hard mode and it can be just as difficult, if not more difficult than Dark Souls.

The unique aspect of Dark Souls is that it is punishing, not hard, if you die and then die again without recovering your corpse you loose all your unspent EXP.

To get the Dark Souls feeling into Guild Wars the death penalty would have to be increased, which would cause quite an uproar I’m sure XD (unless there were specific high-risk, high-reward modes).

minbariguy.7504:

I totally get how some people would want harder PVE content, and I would be in favor of a “hard mode” like GW1 eventually got, but getting 2-shot does not equal fun for me. I play MMO’s to immerse myself in a game world for the purpose of casual, escapist fun, not to pressure myself to develop my twitch skills or die.

Nothing wrong with either preference, mind you, but if PVE content were simply made more difficult for everyone, regardless of preference, I would simply move on to a different game. It just wouldn’t be worth the frustration and would be exactly the opposite of what I’m looking for.

Then play facebook games.

Sovta.4719:

Then play facebook games.

Thanks for the suggestion. No.

EDIT:
So, to sum up —

My attitude: “Yeah, it would be cool if both sides got what they want.”
Your attitude: “No, screw you, only I should get what I want. You leave.”

Got it. By the way, if you’re really all that excited about the idea of harder PVE, Sovta, here’s a suggestion: don’t wear armor. Problem sorted.

Latorn.4209:

Just chiming in on the topic of Dark Souls, those who haven’t played it seem to consistently have the belief that it is unbelievable hard. This isn’t true, set almost any modern game (be it RTS, FPS, or action RPG) to hard mode and it can be just as difficult, if not more difficult than Dark Souls.

The unique aspect of Dark Souls is that it is punishing, not hard, if you die and then die again without recovering your corpse you loose all your unspent EXP.

To get the Dark Souls feeling into Guild Wars the death penalty would have to be increased, which would cause quite an uproar I’m sure XD (unless there were specific high-risk, high-reward modes).

I really wished GW2´s death penalty was similar to GW1: each time you die you get 10% (or so) penalty to life, damage, skill recharge, etc., and you could either reduce it by killing mobs or spend money to erase all your DP on specific locations (like the equipment repairs).

I’ll tell you if they made the rewards worth the difficulty even if it’s souls level difficulty and polished, i wouldn’t be posting on the forums because i’d be having too much fun.

The type of action game that is Dark Souls will NEVER work in GW2 open PVE. Video game PVE combat consists of these parts:

1) The character’s abilities.
GW2 is an MMO, in which people demend “PVE class balance”, “PVP player balance”, and “ability diversity”, i.e. restrictions on cooldowns/builds/stats, whereas a single player game can go as wild as the imagination, and players can CC the hell out of a mob.

2) The player’s skills (brains/tactics/reflex/judgement).
GW2 is an MMO for the widest denominator of the market. Mechanic like mass combat rez is the general teaching material that wins most fights throughout the game.

Who needs skills or tactics to overcome obstacles, when one can simply call a zerg and label it “teamwork”.

3) The mob’s abilities.
In an action game, attacks are made slower, intervals longer, and the telegraphs clearer, because of the need to allow human reaction.

An MMO atack timing is traditionally faster because of passive defense stats that require no human reaction.

GW2 mostly uses MMO attack timing, which is faster and more often, except for some 1-shot attacks.

If GW2 was to adopt the action game timer, all animations would have to be redone.

4) The AI executing those abilities.
GW2 is an MMO, whose computation workload is on the server’s CPU for all users, not on the client’s CPU for just 1 user. Due to the limited CPU resource, MMO AI will always be dumb with little or no team synergy, and more HP and damage output are the common band-aid.

5) Terrain where the combat takes place.
Pathing is an AI. An MMO cuts down server workload and dev budget by avoiding calculating jumping or climbing. Therefore, PVE combat ends up on boring terrains with mechanics like pathing invulnerability/regen.

When is a flying creature in GW2 really flying, as in the hit-box being in the air not on the ground, and a player must use jump-attacks to take it down like in most action games?

6) Execution lag.
Internet transmission (online games) takes longer than internal transmission (single player games). Dodging can be “dodgy”.

7) Visual presentation of information.
In an action game, the “action” is the center of interest, so the player can see what to “react” to. The cameras put the action on the center of the screen, even when the mob is huge. Also, combat text and SFX are made to NOT steal the thunder of the “action”.

GW2 is an MMO, where the chacter and player’s damage number are the center of interest. The camera ends up with the character blocking the mob, or the mob partially off-screen, and meanwhile the combat text, target frame, and SFX distract the player’s attention away from the “action” of the mob.

My conclusion
Video game combat is only difficult when the opponent is smart. Higher HP/damage alone only makes boring combat.

If GW2’s open PVE was like Dark Souls’, yells like “need more for Grenth” would be all over the maps.

The first MMOs were difficult. Mass market can’t deal with difficult; they want trophies for just turning up. So, here we are. Enjoy.

I just nerfed a private story section by running through walls of mobs instead of killing them, and getting to the end of the section, which triggered the finishing cutscene. If you tried that in a game like EQ your character would be stunned, snared, and summarily buried, and you’d have a nasty, nasty corpse run.

In another area of the same section, I was killed four or five times, but because the design can’t deal with death during these areas, I was magically restored to continue fighting i.e. I couldn’t lose.

You can’t have meaningful achievements without genuine loss. There must be something to gain, and something to lose. Modern game design removes the “something to lose” and wonders why the “something to gain” suddenly means nothing.

Souls series isn’t hard. If you don’t rush like would rush a cod game you will only die if 1. go in places where you aren’t supposed to got at low levels or die from traps. But yes i’d preferred dungeons to be like everything in dark souls over the crap we have for sure,.

One thing that I see in this topic is that people keep mixing up the term “casual gamer,” with the term “bad gamer.”

Casual gamers are simply gamers who do not spend a significant amount of time on the game. This does not mean that they are bad at the game, and cannot tackle difficult content. it only means that they do not spend a significant amount of time on the game.

Bad gamers are gamers who are either physically, or mentally, or both physically and mentally unable to perform up to a “par” skill level due to their inherit biology. While being “hardcore” at a game, allows for the gamer to practice more and thus attempt to improve their ability at the game, it does not mean that casual gamers “bad gamers,” or “hardcore gamers,” are good gamers.

well, “very difficult” is bad for business…
but we can start with removing the aggro chase range cap:

in instances there will be no limit to aggro, so people will not be able to skip mobs.
also all melee mobs will have ranged attack and the incredibly silly “invincibility” mechanic should go away if player use terrain as advantage to bug mob.

in open world mobs will chase you through the map, with the only exception of water. water creatures will not chase you on land, land creatures will not chase you to water.

the low levels are working as intended IMHO.
but on higher maps, i would like to see more “logical” mob setup.

more veteran mobs in general, packs of mobs that work together (give boons etc), just like the dredge (thats why we all hate dredge…)

open world “hearts” should be done solo, but not the dynamic events…
most of the players can do solo almost any event including solo champions…

dynamic events should have more veteran mobs, and champion mobs should be less like wolfmaster and more like the nigel giant or magekiller.

this is very easy even at low level:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Kill_the_Son_of_Svanir_and_his_corrupted_wolf_pack

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Kill_the_Tamini_moguls_to_weaken_the_Tamini_forces

this is decent difficulty:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Defeat_the_giant_assaulting_the_Town_of_Nageling

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Kill_the_jotun_abomination_destroying_the_Priory_camp

“If bosses or mobs in PvE could down you in 2-5 hits, would you spend more time playing open world PvE?”

If the drop-rates would be consistently (and severely) increased, absolutely.

Kasama.8941:

I was just watching a 12 min demo of Dark Souls 2, which is a game where the difficulty is very high, and dodging or blocking therefor makes a big difference. So that made me wonder:
.

Dark souls IS NOT difficult…

It has the same issue as GW2 of a stupid AI (so bad that i even doubt can be called ADI) paired with OP enemies.

Now ONCE you learnt pattenrs of any enemy attack the game becomes trivial and easy….

Now i can accept that from a mmorpg, but dark souls despite having a wonderful setting and art, is quite unexcusable….

As for GW2, demon, Dark and i bet darksouls2 players did find the game extremely easy after the first run…

EXACTLY as happens for gw2 dungeons.

Also those sort of games becomes boring really fast…..so i think that type of “challenge” (See frustrating 1st time, easy 2nd and latter) may be good for a short time and for few players……

But i think that it appeals to a very small Group of players…and i bet they don t want gw2 populated with a maximum of 1000 players

RobbySpry.2671:

“If bosses or mobs in PvE could down you in 2-5 hits, would you spend more time playing open world PvE?”

If the drop-rates would be consistently (and severely) increased, absolutely.

No…its already almost so.
Look at Champions/veterans…….they 1-2 shots most professoins…nobody cares.
Also i think ANY mob 2-5 shots most professions….

The reason why they can’t really amp up the difficulty while at the same time giving ridiculous rewards is that it’s not sustainable. For example, making a pve content where only 0.05% of the total population can complete, excluding a time-gate thing, where the reward is a guaranteed precursor, or a stack of ectos. the problem here is that once those 0.05% people finish it, they repeat it and run it so often that in floods the market with those rewards and diminish the overall value of loot. so let’s say there are 3m players overall, worldwide. 0.05% of that is 1,500 players. That’s 1,500 precursors that come into the market every week at best.

Kasama.8941:

I feel like a few are misunderstanding this. Just because something is difficult, it doesn’t mean you are suddenly forced to play it. Even if open world mobs hit harder, you could still just chose to run past them.

Also, there’s a big difference between difficult, and annoying.

Running past mobs means no experience and no drops. I’m pretty sure that people want to play the game…even casuals. Making them run past a lot of stuff means they can’t level and why should they play.

Lose the casuals and there’ll be a whole lot less people playing this game.

Reikou.7068:

One thing that I see in this topic is that people keep mixing up the term “casual gamer,” with the term “bad gamer.”

Casual gamers are simply gamers who do not spend a significant amount of time on the game. This does not mean that they are bad at the game, and cannot tackle difficult content. it only means that they do not spend a significant amount of time on the game.

Casual means that the player doesn’t spend time researching how the game mechanics work. They don’t spend time learning the ins and outs of the character they play. They don’t spend time learning mob patterns and how to use their utility skills to the fullest to counter mobs.

This is why they’re called casuals. They just play the game doing whatever they like, not caring to look deeper into the game than what they see on their screen. Even if a casual is skilled with what he does, he still lacks the knowledge that ‘hardcore’ players have. And you can have all the skill you want, but it’s wasted if you don’t have the knowledge. Which is why casuals aren’t good players.