Guild Wars 2

Wasn’t sure where the official megathread for HoT feedback was, so I decided to post my concerns here. I hope that’s okay!

I missed the last HoT beta, and this time around I’ve been making up for it, trying out a bunch of specialisations that interest me, and of course giving the revenant a good test too! It’s been awesome for the most part, but there are certain aspects that I dislike that are really damaging the experience for me.

One thing I’ve noticed about the mob AI that I wanted to bring to your attention is the difficulty levels. First off, I love the idea of making mobs a more interactive experience, since I felt the ones in the base game could be a bit of a tank-n-spank a lot of the time. However, so far in the beta I’ve found most mobs I’ve interacted with incredibly slow to kill and frustrating. This of course will vary from player to player, and many people are probably happy with the new level of difficulty. I am by no means an excellent player, but I know for sure I’m not a terrible one either, and I found it difficult to even move around without resorting to skipping even some basic mobs.

I understand the idea of wanting to give enemies hard-hitting attacks with obvious tells, however right now I feel some enemies (Mordrem Snipers and Smokescales particularly) hit just a little too hard. This isn’t such a big deal for tankier classes like Revenant or Guardian, but when playing a Berserker Thief, I found myself losing well over 70% of my health for mis-timing a single dodge.

That brings me on to my next point – many of the tells for big attacks seem very easy to miss and often lost in the panic of combat. I saw a small group earlier, maybe 10 or so people attempt to take down a champion, and a good 4+ players were either downed or dead at any given time because the tells for the boss’ bigger attacks were so difficult to see amongst the other players and spells being thrown about.

Finally, some of the core mechanics of certain monsters feel a little off to me. Enemies like the beetles that you can only attack from the front clash with the mechanics of certain classes like Thief and Ranger, that get bonuses from attacking from behind. it feels a little unfair that some people will struggle through a head-on fight, and others will cleave through it simply because of class choice.

Basically, harder combat is definitely a thing I want to see. But I would like to see it toned down a little bit – I don’t like the idea of having to micro manage all my cooldowns and skill use timings for basic overworld enemies :P
How do you guys find the enemy difficulty? Is it more difficult in a challenging way, or do you find it more frustrating? Do I need to git gud, or is this a common problem?

Not to mention the huge lack of mobs using Boons (vs. boon manipulation), Conditions (vs. condition manipulation) and Heavy Armor (vs. direct dmg) so far in the Verdant Brink areas…

There should be atleast few foes that use conditions as primary damage source, dealing low direct dmg as result of that. Some mordrem courtiers and Coztic hyleks use them, but they’re hybrids of direct dmg and conditions, not full condition.

FrostSpectre.4198:

Not to mention the huge lack of mobs using Boons (vs. boon manipulation), Conditions (vs. condition manipulation) and Heavy Armor (vs. direct dmg) so far in the Verdant Brink areas…

There should be atleast few foes that use conditions as primary damage source, dealing low direct dmg as result of that. Some mordrem courtiers and Coztic hyleks use them, but they’re hybrids of direct dmg and conditions, not full condition.

What if some mobs used condition bombs? Attacks with a slow windup and big tell that dropped >15 stacks of bleed on you? They’d reward players for dodging the attack, while still allowing players who failed to dodge some wiggle room to recover though condition cleanses.

No condition and boon mobs mean 66% of necro’s design is trash just like in vanilla GW2 the same could be said for Mallyx. Glad to see they’ve made progress in design and make use of all mechanics the game has to offer.

The mobs are across the board to easy to kill, the health value is too low and they move too little or to low. The damage they do is good, but they are too gated behind the skills, i would like the mobs to have quicker cooldowns, faster movement and attacks at the cost of lower damage for each individual attack.

Boon and condition application for them is lacking too, but again we have only seen small bits.

Overall i felt the difficult was better in BWE1 compared to BW2. this might be because the mobs where kinda different at places or in numbers, but i did like it much more in the first BW.

I’ll add my thoughts to this one.

Overall, the enemies seem okay. There’s a few items I need to point out, but otherwise, I’m, estimated, 70% happy with the encounters.

The other 30% is killing the game for me.

1. Mordrem tormentors cause 5 stacks of Torment with one of their attacks. Alone, it’s actually not so bad. When I’m doing an event and they decide to focus fire me, it’s highly irritating, even if I use my condi-clean on weapon switch.
2. Shadowscales have too much uptime on their mist-evasion. The effect visual doesn’t match the actual timing, either. I’ll be missing for at least two seconds after the effect is gone. And by then, the shadowscale horfs up another mist within two seconds. I don’t mind the mechanic itself. It’s clever, but I think it should be “ignores damage” instead of “evade,” so that a player can still use tactical push/pull, especially when it gets hung up on a stationary object like a security wall or a turret.
3. Damage in some cases is still overtuned. With a Celestial-geared warrior, I shouldn’t be taking 20-25% of my health per hit from small group mobs, and I should be able to stay on the front line without getting downed by ANet’s addictions:
4. One-hit KOs.
5. Knockdown charges with high damage.
6. Over-long multihits that can’t be cleanly evaded.

More specifically:

• Hammer frog champion thing. Not so difficult if you see it coming, but it was a bull- intro when “That is a big frog,” then wham, half the adventuring party is down without warning. It grates me because it’s ANet’s OHKO fetish again, but it’s avoidable with a simple dodge roll.
• The spinning Diarmid needs to have something done about her attack. It goes on too long to be properly avoided, and she chases someone until they die. Recommendations: Don’t chase, but do a wide-path nautilus; shorter spin duration (3 sec?); much slower chase speed. Any one of those would bring her from overpowered to just right.
• As mentioned above, shadowscales should be “ignore damage/conditions” while in mist, so push/pull can still be used.

I may be going against the general consensus here, but I think the damage values are pretty perfectly tuned. It actually punishes glass cannon builds, which is something that the base game completely neglected to do. If you’d going full offense with no defenses other than dodges, you had better make sure you don’t miss any of them. If anything, enemies should attack faster, so it’s harder to rely purely on dodges to survive, and make passive defense something other than useless. I was rather disappointed at how well I could survive the jungle as a full zerker revenant or mesmer (I’m extremely bad at ele and thief, so I died a lot with them, but that’s not too different from my experience in the base game either). Some enemy health also seems rather low, particularly the smaller frogs, who would often die in the course of a single Reaper GS auto chain.

I loved how much the ranged enemies would try to avoid melee combat, and how the bullfrogs were so tough against physical damage. The first time I charged at a Mordrem Sniper and he kicked me off a cliff I got ridiculously excited. And pocket raptor swarms are absolutely brilliantly done.

Basically, the only enemies I think need a lot of work are the smokescales and the beetles. The smokescales just need to actually stop evading once you kite them out of their mist field. And the beetles, while I like the idea, don’t really work well if there’s multiple people nearby, since they’ll often just randomly switch targets and make it unreasonably hard to actually stay in their damage cone.

@Cap

Mesmer may be the reason you’re not seeing the damage-death some of us are. :Because mesmers are cool. <3 But as it is, mesmer clones can suck up a least a little bit of damage that would normally go to the player. A suitably tricky mesmer can come out of a fight sparkling clean. (I love them for that.)

I feel where the damage should be scaled is in relation to an average-geared Warrior. Their entire purpose is to suck up damage and fight back on the front line. Right now, in full Celestial, I can’t do that without getting completely trucked. This is with using dodges and interrupts.
I’m not getting murdered by every tiny thing, but the moment I get in a complicated fight, something, out of nowhere, manages to do 15k+ damage in a very short time, and the only healing skill that can keep up is Healing Signet with some kiting.

Overall, I’d agree that most of the mobs are in a decent place so far. With me and a friend, it’d be significantly easier. …I think the map itself may have killed me more than the mobs, actually.

Y’all should’ve been there during the vanilla beta. People had the exact same complaints about the basic mobs in Queensdale and other starter areas. It’s likely the unfamiliarity that’s the big kicker. Once people are more familiar with these new mobs, people will get through them just fine. Part of the idea behind these mobs is that being a berserker should be scary. Early launch Orr was a scary place for everyone, even in soldiers, but people eventually got used to it. Now granted, mobs in general were weakened, and Orr was hit twice, so nothing is nearly as scary as they were at launch.

One thing I do agree with is the lack of boons, conditions, or other mechanics. Players can take advantage of those mechanics in pvp and wvw, but the lack of them completely changes pve. Having mobs that can act just a little more like players would benefit pve a ton.

The difficulty is perfectly fine. People just need to practice and learn how to fight the mobs. I’ve been spending lots of time just fighting certain mobs and finding the best and quickest way to take them down on whatever class I am on. Once people are more familiar it will become easier.

Snipers are VERY squishy and can be burst down quickly. This is especially true for any class with reflects. Smokescales are a little tricky, but the key is to make sure you don’t try to fight them inside that smoke circle of theirs and to dodge their teleporting attack.

I havent read through the whole thread but I needed to answer to this point in particular:

>Shadowscales have too much uptime on their mist-evasion. The effect visual doesn’t match the actual timing, either. I’ll be missing for at least two seconds after the effect is gone. And by then, the shadowscale horfs up another mist within two seconds. I don’t mind the mechanic itself. It’s clever, but I think it should be “ignores damage” instead of “evade,” so that a player can still use tactical push/pull, especially when it gets hung up on a stationary object like a security wall or a turret.

Shadowscales are an example of proper design. They’re high damage low hp npcs that will most surely kill people who are unwary and sporting low survival skills/stats, thus forcing a change of mindset over the recurring zerker meta we’ve had in the game for so long.

The thing about shadowscales is to not fight them directly. The first move will be theirs, and if it isnt, it will be the second. They will drop their mist field always after their initial unrelenting assault(https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Unrelenting_Assault). The idea here is to pull them off their field. Just move out and they’ll pursue you. They’re open for damage right there.

Its an example of good design because it forces you to change tactics in order to approach it. If your character has access to some sort of shielding, evasion or invulnerability, usage of these surival skills is key to surviving. Allows anet to perform a “has enough defense?” check on people before moving on harder designs and train players. Forces you to use game mechanics almost never relied upon in the core game. AI manipulation/Aggro control/Kiting is a massively useful player skill most people havent learnt in 3 years yet.

@Rainiris
I respect the design. I know how to handle it. I even said so. >_>

Most specifically, my concern is when it gets hung up on a stationary object like a security wall or a turret. During a defense event, there is next to nothing to be done against them, because they won’t move.

I’m iffy at best about the severely low cooldown time. If it were a player ability, it would get shouted down in a heartbeat.

Rainiris.1975:

I havent read through the whole thread but I needed to answer to this point in particular:

>Shadowscales have too much uptime on their mist-evasion. The effect visual doesn’t match the actual timing, either. I’ll be missing for at least two seconds after the effect is gone. And by then, the shadowscale horfs up another mist within two seconds. I don’t mind the mechanic itself. It’s clever, but I think it should be “ignores damage” instead of “evade,” so that a player can still use tactical push/pull, especially when it gets hung up on a stationary object like a security wall or a turret.

Shadowscales are an example of proper design. They’re high damage low hp npcs that will most surely kill people who are unwary and sporting low survival skills/stats, thus forcing a change of mindset over the recurring zerker meta we’ve had in the game for so long.

The thing about shadowscales is to not fight them directly. The first move will be theirs, and if it isnt, it will be the second. They will drop their mist field always after their initial unrelenting assault(https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Unrelenting_Assault). The idea here is to pull them off their field. Just move out and they’ll pursue you. They’re open for damage right there.

Its an example of good design because it forces you to change tactics in order to approach it. If your character has access to some sort of shielding, evasion or invulnerability, usage of these surival skills is key to surviving. Allows anet to perform a “has enough defense?” check on people before moving on harder designs and train players. Forces you to use game mechanics almost never relied upon in the core game. AI manipulation/Aggro control/Kiting is a massively useful player skill most people havent learnt in 3 years yet.

Their design is great. But you’re not understanding the main complaint. The counter to their evasion field is to move them out of it. However, after they leave the field, they still evade for a few seconds. And if there’s a large event going on, usually they’ll choose to just switch to another target that’s still in the field. And sometimes you try to kite them properly but they get stuck running against a bush or snag in terrain and just stay in their field.

They need to have spell effect culling in this game. I can’t see crap if there’s a guardian/elementalist/mesmer around covering the mob in spell effects.

My biggest problem is all of the vines slinging poison at you while you are trying to survive the onslaught of mobs, in camp defense. The vines also have way too much health IMO. Also, the camp defenses don’t seem to scale well and players get overcome quickly. This wont be a problem at the launch of HoT, but may become one once the player base spreads out some.

Mordrem Snipers on anything that doesn’t have reflects aren’t fun to fight at all. You’d think interrupting them would be a good way to handle them but they have almost no cooldown on their sniping skill. It’s really annoying, and then their channeled arrow volley, dodging doesn’t avoid all of the arrows because of the channeled nature of the attack.

Smokescales are also just plain not fun to fight because they will camp in their smoke that makes them evade everything and then do their channeled shadowstepping attack which is again, not something you can just dodge because you’ll only dodge part of it.

These 2 mobs suck the fun right out of adventuring in the jungle. They make Teragriffs enjoyable to fight in comparison.

There were these mobs that seem to dodge almost every attack a lot, man they were hard. It fun, and I know tweaking plus my character not like what I am user to yet, so it makes it hard to judge.

I think the enemies are a little strong for soloing, but they seem fine for group combat, which is probably what they calibrated it to for the events. A lot of it does have to do with figuring out new strategies, but there’s definitely an unexpectedly high level of punishment for not knowing them.

Agreeing that smokescales and snipers need some tuning, I think everything else is in a pretty good place.

Except adolescent fire wyverns. They’re not at all difficult, they’re just silly. Their big aoe attack is like a 10 second evade with no possible counter. They always use it right off the bat, and as far as I can tell you can’t even interrupt it because the evade starts as soon as the attack initiates, there’s no cast time. And it’s so slow that they’re never going to kill you with it, you just move out of range and watch until they finish flying in circles so you can move in and two-shot them. It’s ridiculous.

Ghotistyx.6942:

Y’all should’ve been there during the vanilla beta. People had the exact same complaints about the basic mobs in Queensdale and other starter areas. It’s likely the unfamiliarity that’s the big kicker. Once people are more familiar with these new mobs, people will get through them just fine. Part of the idea behind these mobs is that being a berserker should be scary. Early launch Orr was a scary place for everyone, even in soldiers, but people eventually got used to it. Now granted, mobs in general were weakened, and Orr was hit twice, so nothing is nearly as scary as they were at launch.

Indeed, whole zergs were easily wipped by life sapping champion ghosts that dominated the field with 1,5K+ range abilities. Or the illusionary gorilla champion, that mob was nothing than scarily brutal. People waited for hours to try Grenth again and again, until crafty guys found out that five peole can make Grenth much easier. then fifty.

Ghotistyx.6942:

Y’all should’ve been there during the vanilla beta. People had the exact same complaints about the basic mobs in Queensdale and other starter areas. It’s likely the unfamiliarity that’s the big kicker. Once people are more familiar with these new mobs, people will get through them just fine. Part of the idea behind these mobs is that being a berserker should be scary. Early launch Orr was a scary place for everyone, even in soldiers, but people eventually got used to it. Now granted, mobs in general were weakened, and Orr was hit twice, so nothing is nearly as scary as they were at launch.

One thing I do agree with is the lack of boons, conditions, or other mechanics. Players can take advantage of those mechanics in pvp and wvw, but the lack of them completely changes pve. Having mobs that can act just a little more like players would benefit pve a ton.

I was around in vanilla beta and what I can say is that before BWE1, mobs were similar to how they are now, maybe even slightly easier (though they could cause conditions in starter zones unlike post NPE mobs), the complaint was that the game was too easy so for BWE1 anet cranked up mob damage and health substantially. Then the complaints came in that everything was hitting too hard and really it kind of was. Normal mobs were 2-3 shotting you with normal melee attacks. “Just dodge” right, well, there’d be 4-6 of them at a time, so dodging all of that usually doesn’t pan out. They ended up tuning the mobs downward some so that it’s more like 5-6 shots before you go down rather than 2-3.

I watch smokescales drop people who are unable to do anything about their channeled attack while they whiff away (even though they’re not standing in the smoke field, the smokescale did its shadowstep FROM the smoke field so it’s still evading) all the time.

They’re kind of a bs mob.

Like I said. dodging channeled attacks doesn’t really work as it only dodges about half of the attack if you’re lucky.

You really have to be on your toes more than what people are accustomed to. There’s some stuff that can wreck you in a hurry if you are caught unawares.

I’ll say, I’m pretty accustomed to having to react quickly in game to counter act the lag I deal with on my not so great machine I’m playing on, but there are definitely a few of the creatures in HoT maps that are a little hard to deal with. Even my full cleric’s gear herald spec Rev has a hard time dealing with the snipers and smokescales, and I pretty much always play support classes in the existing game so I’m pretty used to how their utility/playstyle works. Playing on anything that was any sort more dps based got face-rolled in two seconds, and didn’t really have time to even react to things like the snipers’ channeled skill before you were downed and dead. Which I understand they are trying to pull away from the meta of zerk stuff, which I love, but there are still going to be instances where someone is not going to be running w/e the ‘new meta’ becomes, so it feels a bit unfair to those who do still really prefer the more dps playtyle. I feel these mobs need to have either some of their cool downs on skills increased, or their dmg of their skills tuned back a bit to make them a bit more manageable, but that’s just my opinion on things.

I can’t say that I found any of the enemies to be unfairly difficult. I do however, see a whole lot of people completely ignoring tactical combat, and still mindlessly attacking. Take the Smokescales as an example; people keep fighting them in their mist. It clearly states that they are evading when within the mist.. so why aren’t people pulling them out of it? All things considered, these things are actually rather squishy once you counter their survival mechanics and move them. It’s a good combat design, but one that oh so many people have frustrated me with when I’m running around these past BW’s—they keep them inside their mist.

Tells on enemies are across the board easy to notice. I am able to interrupt practically everything that is not featuring the Breakbar (and I am not a big fan of it, just as I am not a fan of Defiance). On the note of the Breakbar (and Defiance), why is it that certain enemies are completely designed to be immune to interrupts? There are a number of traits that my Mesmer (or now Chronomancer) has, that is revolving around the ability to interrupt a target. I need to be able to interrupt in order to trigger such effects as; Vulnerability, Quickness, Slow, Weakness + Damage, to recharge my Pistol skills, Immobilize + gain Might + apply one more random Condition and Boon. Why am I being prevented from actually functioning to my potential? Wouldn’t it be a better design to make at least the auto-attacks interruptable? I can understand that it is in order to create some sense of difficulty when there are a large number of players involved in an encounter, but to make enemies practically immune to what I would consider partially a core mechanic to the Mesmer profession (we have the largest amount of traits revolving it, and a good amount of interrupt oriented skills)? Why? Your combat designers must be capable of thinking up a better way. Such as certain skills being uninterruptable, if not all but the auto-attack. Don’t completely negate a professions capabilities of being relevant. The Breakbar is benefiting from interrupt builds, sure, but it doesn’t trigger interrupt effects such as the ones I listed above. This is a huge problem as I see it.

Also, the beetles—another annoyance since Season 2. They are so stupidly designed that the illusions are not capable of dealing damage to them from all orientations. Again, a profession is vastly kitten by a quite frankly stupid design decision. Illusions are mind-implicated effects, right? So why in the world would they be bound by some sort of physical shell? Isn’t the entire underlying idea of the Mesmer profession that they torment the mind of their targets to create these illusions? Isn’t that why they break when the target is defeated? Why in the world aren’t the criteria to create the illusion when facing the target, but otherwise, when shattering (not incl. the now inherent Illusionary Persona) they will still hit, and the same goes for their attacks, regardless of where they are hitting on the beetle. Unlike the Ranger, a Mesmer can’t plausibly rotate (as you would if you were a tank in a “trinity game”) the beetle to make their pet capable of hitting. At best, we can perhaps do that for one of our Phantasms. We have lowered personal damage, because we have 3 sources of additional damage (clones for conditions of some sort), which are due to a silly design choice, neglected.

But overall however, I am very happy with the difficulty of the new zone that we’ve been shown in these past beta events. They require some strategic reaction, such as taking out Tormentors asap. and so on forth. A bit more thinking behind the combat. Aside from flaws with the Breakbar (and Defiance as it is), and certain silly design decisions such as the beetle taking damage only from its nose, the enemies present a good challenge, but none that can’t be overcome. I think for the most part, players just need to learn how to deal with them efficiently. And how to react to clear tells. I haven’t seen a single enemy that didn’t have a very obvious tell for hard hitting attacks. Mesmer aren’t the tankiest of professions (though not the squishiest either), and I haven’t had huge issues traversing the jungle. If anything, the little mushrooms can be a bit of a hell-nugget to deal with. But I’ll figure them out. I’m sure I will. Please, for the love of Gaben, do not dumb down the encounters just yet. Players need time to adapt and learn to deal with them. But do look into how certain mechanics gimps certain professions key mechanics though.. that’s just unfair design and asking for professions to be shunned as less useful by the community.

Sarunei.8057:

Rev has a hard time dealing with the snipers and smokescales

I’d say hammer is the tool of choice for snipers. Use your projectile shield and take them out as quickly as you can. If your shield is on D&D, make use of the evade on hammer 3.

For smokescales, Sword 3 works exactly like their attack and you can use it to avoid the damage.

I like the concept behind the smokescale….

You can’t just engage one and faceroll it, you need to pull it out of its aoe otherwise all of your attacks miss.

Great concept….. on paper.

What I have noticed time and time again is that two or more of these foes will engage an allied npc and wrap their smoke fields, making them invlunerable.

The npcs do not know how to properly combat the smokescales so they will sit in the aoe and try to fight…. and since the npc has the aggro of the smokescales, they will never leave their aoe as they continue attacking the npc.

If the smokescales can’t kill the npc, we get an endless battle.

I’ve seen this at least ten times now… something needs to be tweaked.

Either change it so that the smokescales can kill the npcs or change the npc ai to leave the smoke field.

TheBlackLeech.9360:

Either change it so that the smokescales can kill the npcs or change the npc ai to leave the smoke field.

Yes, please.

It’s not the only issue with them, though. At least NPCs can move. Turrets and HP walls (the ones that hold back during defense events) don’t move at all. Turrets can at least be blown up remotely, so it’s not that much of an issue, but it’s still bothersome.

I’m hoping there’s a way to code it so that pushes and pulls can still work while making them immune to damage or other conditions.

Rauderi.8706:

• Hammer frog champion thing. Not so difficult if you see it coming, but it was a bull- intro when “That is a big frog,” then wham, half the adventuring party is down without warning. It grates me because it’s ANet’s OHKO fetish again, but it’s avoidable with a simple dodge roll.
• The spinning Diarmid needs to have something done about her attack. It goes on too long to be properly avoided, and she chases someone until they die. Recommendations: Don’t chase, but do a wide-path nautilus; shorter spin duration (3 sec?); much slower chase speed. Any one of those would bring her from overpowered to just right.
• As mentioned above, shadowscales should be “ignore damage/conditions” while in mist, so push/pull can still be used.

I concur with you that the Smokescale animations are a bit off and when they focus on an NPC or structure they can’t be kited away but other than that they are fine imho. Like the thrashers using life siphon in the SW people need to learn mob mechanics. I still see people fighting the smokescale in their red circles and wondering why they can’t hit it.

I found the Hammer Frog Champion pretty fun. It’s ok to have some champs that will be extremely difficult for zerkers to melee. Just range. I was running a pretty tough build and had a lot of fun in melee against him.

The Spinning Diarmid got me the first time. I only dodged once when it went spin-to-win mode. The 2nd time I dodged twice away from him and survived just fine. Can even use movement/blocks if needed.

We have to remember players are using new builds against new mob mechanics and some refuse to give up on their zerker builds no matter how many times they die. You truly have to have the skill and mob knowledge to pull off a zerker build out here and that’s how it should be.

So my advice is to take it slow and safe at first. Go ranged when needed. Use builds with more survivability. Learn mob mechanics and learn how to operate all these new builds.

My problem is with how poorly telegraphed some of the abilities are.

The rain of arrows during one champion event is an example. Instead of taking a page from the organe telegraphs, they make it transparent so in a sea of spell effects you only notice it once you take damage.

This was my first time playing the HoT Beta and I made a Revenant, Reaper, and a Tempest. Out of the three I would say Revenant was the most played.
When I first created the character, I specced it like a Guardian for heals and toughness, Cleric’s armor with Dolyak runes, 1 handed mace with shield but I added 1 handed Berserker swords for the Shiro Legendary Assassin stance. I used the 1 handed mace/shield for Ventari or Dwarf stance. I found the Dwarf stance to be okay, the yellow brick road saved my comrades quite a few times (don’t know the names of the new abilities yet, so that’s what I call it), however I found myself switching between Ventari and Shiro most often.
People around me were impressed with the Tablet and said so many times. The combination of burst heals, refuge, condi cleanse made it a joy to play. Playing Shiro with the Shadowstep abilities was comparable to playing a Thief in heavy armor. After I learned the mechanics of the Profession, there wasn’t an NPC I couldn’t take down solo (except for Champions). The teleporting Hyleks were a pain at first but coupled with Shiro’s Shadowstepping abilities made short work of them very quickly.

Our Guild ran together on Saturday, and the Revenant was quite useful. I did discover much to my dismay that Reaper was lacking if you went full Berserker as the 2 Handed Sword is for that build (no condi damage). Rather disappointed there. A friend who plays Necro often went repeatedly down as his Reaper simply didn’t have the defense to keep himself up for very long.
Later on I made my own Reaper and specced full Rabid gear, armor, trinkets, weapons but use a Greatsword just to see what it was all about. It was rather subpar and my combat log showed damage tics of under 100 pts or less, whereas Scepter/dagger were much higher per tic. Shroud is where it’s at. Skill number four and five is awesome and I found myself in the Silverwastes fighting a fort full of Mordrems with very little danger to myself as long as stayed in Shroud which was easy if I used Spectral Armor. I did discover that Foor in Grave doesn’t seem to work as intended as the mobs could run me over in shroud. Sometimes I would have stability and sometimes not.
I do think that while in the downed state there should be some way to gain stability to prevent rollover from mobs as you’re trying to heal. The mounted mobs in Verdant Brink and the SW made going into the downed state most annoying. I would of course try to target the NPC with the least amount of health and Life Siphon/Rally off them, but the constant multiple run overs made this nigh impossible.
I found the Reaper most enjoyable in a condi build but as stated before was disappointed that the Great sword is a Power build weapon.

I joined my guild in some WvW later on and the Reaper was quite enjoyable. Occasionally I would get jumped by a lone Thief or Guardian and have a nice quick battle on my hands. A Thief vs a Reaper in Shroud is a losing battle for the Thief every time and they die very quickly. I thought he had stealthed, only to see him several yards away in a downed state. I think what surprised me most about the encounter was the Legendary champion title below the toon’s name. Maybe the payer was sick that day, or his cat jumped on the keyboard , spoiling his timing. Whatever it was, it seemed like blind luck on my part as I rarely SPvP.
The Guardian put up more of a fight and I made the mistake of chasing after him and he led me into a mob of his friends. Shroud (with it’s distorting effects around the screen) can make it difficult to see enemy NPC’s at range. Yeah he killed me and came at me later again and got whipped.

I tried the Tempest all of 5 minutes, hated the Elite skills and didn’t even bother. For a light armor class it seems really weird to have to be in melee range to pull off most of the effects. Also since I usually run a D/D Sinister/ Runes of Balthazar build I was very disappointed to not see those runes included in the Beta armor sets, so I had to pull some out of my bank.
Still, it wasn’t really impressive. My regular non Beta Ele has better survival and dps than the Tempest, so um yeah……

All in all a very fun experience and offhand I can’t think of anything I would change, except maybe the Revenant Shiro issues of sometimes Shadow stepping into terrain and being unable to get out (unless I way point).

PS:

if NPC’s are allowed to knock players off a cliff… players should be able to do the same thing to NPC’s. i’m so tired of NOT being allowed to use knockbacks to the fullest extent against NPCs…

I may be going against the general consensus here, but I think the damage values are pretty perfectly tuned. It actually punishes glass cannon builds, which is something that the base game completely neglected to do.

I would be fine with them doing this, making it so that more tankiness is important to have, IF they balanced that out by the enemies having less HP, so that a tankier build can still kill things in a reasonable amount of time, As it currently stands, even a relatively zerker build can take forever to kill most enemies, so a pure tank build would just be a snorefest. Enemies can be hard hitting or hard skinned, not both.

I also feel that too many of the enemies are dropping persistent damage fields now, which can make it very difficult for a melee character to position himself to deal any damage, when the entire battlefield is either on fire, poisoned, covered with bees, or all of the above.

Forgotten Legend.9281:

PS:

if NPC’s are allowed to knock players off a cliff… players should be able to do the same thing to NPC’s. i’m so tired of NOT being allowed to use knockbacks to the fullest extent against NPCs…

That would require a huge overhaul of some systems.

Enemies cannot be identified as “in the air”. Proof? Glitched floating mobs. If what you want were possible, mobs could never float. Get stuck in cliffs, maybe.

More proof? Flying bird enemies and NPCs. Animation wise they leave the ground, but the actual object is on the ground.

Only players so far are the only things that can actually be in the air and thus suffer fall damage.

The reasons for this, I think, is for 2 reasons:

1) The obvious one, cheesing some bosses. New tactics for all bosses for record clear time is mass CC, push to cliff, and spartan kick. 15 minute boss fight? 15 second boss fight.

2) Server reasons. Now you have to keep track of all the physics of all NPCs, enemies, and ambient creatures because they are susceptible to fall damage and can actually fall.

I played through the beta as the Daredevil, Revenant and Reaper, and i think the difficulty of most of the enemies were fine. If anything, basic enemies need MORE health.

I also agree with previous posters that smokescales blindfield and the Legendary Diarmid super spin chase attack are both ridiculously OP as it stands.

Rauderi.8706:

I’m hoping there’s a way to code it so that pushes and pulls can still work while making them immune to damage or other conditions.

There is, Molten Protectors work exactly like that.

1) The obvious one, cheesing some bosses. New tactics for all bosses for record clear time is mass CC, push to cliff, and spartan kick. 15 minute boss fight? 15 second boss fight.

True, but yeah it would be nice if normal enemies could be kicked off cliffs, while important boss mobs were immune to the sorts of CCs that could knock them over.

Ohoni.6057:

1) The obvious one, cheesing some bosses. New tactics for all bosses for record clear time is mass CC, push to cliff, and spartan kick. 15 minute boss fight? 15 second boss fight.

True, but yeah it would be nice if normal enemies could be kicked off cliffs, while important boss mobs were immune to the sorts of CCs that could knock them over.

I have to admit one of the only really fun parts of SWTOR’s combat was that you COULD kill things by force pushing them over cliffs… though sometimes it bugged out the mobs (which is why they don’t let us do it here, if the fall doesn’t kill them the mob gets stuck trying to get back to you)

Some Enemy Feedback…

Hyleks:

- If the feel behind Hylek is that they are supposed to be annoying to fight, then for the most part that feeling is set. However I don’t mean annoying in a bad sense, rather some of the mechanics behind fighting these mob variations ends up making you think outside the box and build, and if you don’t have a right utility you will have a rough time, but not a frustrating one.

- For instance, ranged damage players will despise the evading ranged Hyleks, however a simple discourse of getting close at a good time (not when they do their shotgun arrow fire, that hurts) will make your hits land. It is probably best to have a CC to lay into them first with before blowing them up. Their health is moderate, so a single hundred blades from a berserker warrior won’t be enough to kill them outright.

- ‘Hammer Bro’ Hylek I feel is a few steps shy from being an entertaining mob. The first issue is that it has a stronger Breakbar due to its mechanic, it seems to take twice or even thrice as many CCs to topple one of these guys than the others of the same level and catagory. I think the Breakbar needs to be toned down slightly but as a buff, grant the mob perma-quickness when you break it the first time. Actually, make the mob have permanent Vulnerability when you break it as well, let’s call it a ‘Berserk’ of sorts for breaking the mob’s armor.

Saurians:

- Smokescales, as others have pointed out, have some solid design points but a critical issue. I am not sure if this has been pointed out yet, but the smokefield they make has an interesting interaction. Any projectiles and attacks that go through it will miss their target 100%. This was probably obvious, however this also means if the Smokescale is outside the smokefield on the other side away from you, and you fire a shot through the field to hit the creature, it will MISS. This is a troublesome mechanic that requires baiting it out of the field manually rather than finding a way to force it out. My suggestion would be to reduce the size of the field a bit, and allow certain push and pull effects to work as long as the caster isn’t in the field. I do like these mobs though.

- Tiny Raptors (dawww ERMAGAWD MA FACE!) I also don’t mind, they are the tiny swarming damaging mob with low life and suspectible to AoE everyone loves. What would be a cool concept is perhaps a stronger single mob capable of ordering these raptors to mark certain players to be prioritized until dead. Hylek Raptor trainers, that’ll be an interesting thing.

Modrem:

- Tormentors definitely do live up to their name. Their torment spam with the slow homing projectile is nightmarish, but they do go down fast. They are only a real issue when you aren’t just fighting them one to one, they are nearly glass.

- Cavaliers are beefy, mobile and actually fun to fight one to one. Their charge spam could get crazy with many of them moving at once and it can get difficult to melee them. I haven’t tested this, but if their charges can be blocked, can we have a special interaction if the player blocking the charge has stability? If the player has stability while also blocking a Cavaliers charge, have the cavalier suffer a stun like they do when they hit a wall. THAT would make for some interesting play, just don’t apply that same thing to the larger saurian from the BWE1, those things are massive and I don’t think the same interaction should exist for those.

- Snipers…might be doing a bit too much damage, but I can explain. Throughout this Beta Weekend I have been testing my Dire Condi-Berserker (because I love me some warrior) and even though I have had something around 3.2k toughness with a nice bit of vitality, those snipers still hit like a truck. Yes, they are supposed to be high damage mobs with around 10k life (seriously I think it it literally 10k for a level 80 normal sniper), however I think the problem is more a toughness issue than a mob issue. Can we have a look at the value of Toughness?

These are the mobs that stood out most for me. I probably could go into more detail but I would like to keep testing Berserker

Maximum Potato.5923:

I understand the idea of wanting to give enemies hard-hitting attacks with obvious tells, however right now I feel some enemies (Mordrem Snipers and Smokescales particularly) hit just a little too hard. This isn’t such a big deal for tankier classes like Revenant or Guardian, but when playing a Berserker Thief, I found myself losing well over 70% of my health for mis-timing a single dodge.

You do realize Guardians are in the lowest health pool and can “tank” any “hard hits” Just as well as any class that can dodge/evade/block…

I do feel like the enemies were easier this weekend than the last, though I’m not sure to attribute that to if they were actually easier (as either damage they produce or HP they have) or if I’d gotten better with the new traits or the damage output of the new classes. I KNOW necros got a huge damage boost with gravedigger and it is delightfully sexy as it is. I imagine it will be toned down a little as things get balanced out, but currently I feel rewarded for using gravedigger which is what they were aiming for.

I had a good time with the difficulty with the prior beta weekend. However, this is only the first map, I wouldn’t want to discourage players right from the get go. I love tough, I love a challenge and I don’t mind if you make the later maps as difficult as people were complaining that they were last time. I know a lot of people solo, myself included and that level of difficulty turns them off. It’s a hard area to bridge the gap between people who like challenging content and those who play casually.

But here we have opportunity. In the original content of gw2, there’s virtually no need to group up with anyone when roaming maps unless you’re behind on your equipment. (ah, the level grind) This is fresh, level 80 combat so you’re supposed to have your equipment situation figured out by now. Now is the time where stuff is supposed to get challenging, and so I feel more people will be grouping up in maps and making more of the community that people talk about. I like the idea of grouping up in our small little deathsquads and taking on what Mordremoth has to offer. I can ask people from my guild, but I’ve been meeting up with plenty of people in the map areas easily enough. I would say continue to make things more difficult as people have asked, but make the transition almost unnoticeable and people will accept it.

I think the current difficulty I had encountered this weekend is a good starting point. Let’s have later maps be just as awesome but give ’em some steroids

My biggest issue with smokescales is that if they start their shadowstep channel from inside the smoke field they destroy you and are evading at the same time. Nothing you can do against them. If you’re trying to bait them to leave the smokefield they’ll shadowstep instead.