Guild Wars 2

Does anyone else also think that Anet made way too much use of so called ‘Fake Difficulty’ to make HoT more challenging? (Fake Difficulty = adding unfair elements to increase difficulty or just plain boosting numbers to compensate for lacking AI)

Whenever a situation becomes ‘difficult’ in the game. I can’t help but feel the difficulty is artificial or unfair.

Let’s take the hylek shadowleapers for example. They wouldn’t be so annoying if not for their random invulnerability. Or those hero points where you have to kill a boss would be less tedious if we didn’t have to slaughter a damage sponge. Or the kitten ‘headshot’ attack from that one champion axemaster in the canopy that just downs you no matter what. These just don’t feel like they require more skill to beat, just more time or greater numbers of players…

IMO improving the AI would be a way better method of raising difficulty. Enemies that can evade oae’s ,intentionally transfer or cure conditions at the right times and smart positioning would be huge improvements. The game has the technology to do that kind of things, it’s just only used very rarely (or ineffectively)

Does anyone else feel this way, or am I just expecting too much?

I haven’t seen anything that seemed like artifical difficulty other that the migraine mode or perhaps upper tier fractals.

For axe master, you’re supposed to break his bar to prevent that attack. That’s one of the primary mechanics of the fight.

Their favorite tactic, used all over the game, it was all they did to try to make dungeons harder, and its all they’ve done to make raids harder, tons of hp and enrage timers.
So mechanic, much wow.

That particular fight in the canopy is one of a handful they don’t actually use it in.

I personally don’t see an issue with timers but that’s just me.

if a mob can fight like half a player….im pretty sure many will ask for nerf…literally

Ayrilana.1396:

I haven’t seen anything that seemed like artifical difficulty other that the migraine mode or perhaps upper tier fractals.

For axe master, you’re supposed to break his bar to prevent that attack. That’s one of the primary mechanics of the fight.

Wich just requires a bunch of people, not more skill. I think anything that is undodgeable,unblockable and pierces invulnerability is just cheap design. You would normally be able to survive this attack? Guess again! Random game mechanic! Your invunerability is no longer valid! They basically change the rules in their own favor.

Alexander.6250:

Ayrilana.1396:

I haven’t seen anything that seemed like artifical difficulty other that the migraine mode or perhaps upper tier fractals.

For axe master, you’re supposed to break his bar to prevent that attack. That’s one of the primary mechanics of the fight.

Wich just requires a bunch of people, not more skill. I think anything that is undodgeable,unblockable and pierces invulnerability is just cheap design. You would normally be able to survive this attack? Guess again! Random game mechanic! Your invunerability is no longer valid! They basically change the rules in their own favor.

No. It just requires people to break its bar which is still a new, and currently difficult, concept for people. This will change with time. I’ve seen it done with 5 people.

I don’t think “fake difficulty” is the right term really. It’s real difficulty. It’s just that the difficulty comes from a very specific counter or an endurance trial or whatever.

I think the issue is that a lot of the difficulty comes from a sort of overly re-used bag of tricks. As much as people complain about evade and stun frogs I think they’re some of the best designed mobs as they have these really specific behaviors that are special to only them. Same for smokescales. Heck, even the snipers are fun since the counterplay is less about timing and instance reaction dodge and more about timing the aimed shot dodge or interrupting (maybe it needs a little countdown to make the mechanic more clear?)

Then you have like three varieties of saurians that all do knockdown waves constantly, and one that has a special attack that requires either reflects or lots of evasion, despite the fact not all builds can actually equip enough evasion or reflects.

The larger saurians seem to me like the weakest enemies in the expansion in terms of design difficulty. I have fun fighting frogs, snipers, pocket raptors, smokescales, etc. I Don’t really have fun fighting the big dinosaurs that just rely on stunlock combos that not even a berserker has enough stunbreaks to reliably counter for the duration of the fight.

Fake difficulty is basically something that negates all other methods except an arbitrary one that there was no way to know you had to have, or demands ridiculously specific movements over an unreasonably long amount of time. Or you weren’t even able to see the threat. An example of fake difficulty would be an event that isn’t labeled a group event but actually is tuned as such, or invisible obstacles that did not render.

Another example is in the game Mega Man 2. There are two bosses in this game that require a specific weapon to win, and the weapons have limited energy. There is no way to tell in game you needed. One in particular just gives you exactly enough energy to win. If you ran out or didn’t have full before, well gg. Have fun killing yourself until you get a continue. And here’s a very infamous Mega Man example: https://youtu.be/iTuws-gV8mY?t=158 Now, that’s fake difficulty because player skill cannot help you. (warning: language)

The only one listed that counts IMO listed is probably the canopy champion axemaster that can just kill you just because. Everything else can be countered simply on good reactions. The hylek stealth guys are just really hard, not fake difficulty. If you could have reasonably gotten away, then it’s no longer the game’s fault.

There’s a lot of artificial difficulties in ANet’s enemy design.
Well, to say “a lot” is inaccurate. It’s the same one-note fake difficulty, spammed ad nauseum.

Namely, excessive hard CC mostly used as a base attack.
Blinds from dust mites or Twilight Arbor Zojja.
Arrowhead side-roll.
Charging knockdown mushrooms, dinosaurs, and cavaliers.

I’m absolutely fine with these being mechanics, but when it’s their only mechanic, it’s excessive and poorly designed. Sure, you can dodge/block some of it, but you run out of defenses before you can even mount an offense at that point, and you can’t CC them because of an immunity or needing several to shave off the break bar.
Stability? That’s a joke, because those cooldowns are far too long and the effects far too short, and most classes don’t (or barely) get access to it.

ANet’s fetish for one-hit KOs is also a problem, ..but less so? Big attacks should be threatening, and low-HP, high risk play should come with that as a counter, but it feels like even an armored warrior is going to take fatal damage from the one-shots in GW2.

apart from the megaman reference, there is no “fake difficulty” brought up in this thread. “Fake difficulty”, “artificial difficulty”, “it is not hard, it is tedious” etc. usually translate into “hey, I am having a hard time, but I am not a bad player. So there is must be something shady with that difficulty”.

Well, in any case, I think the difficulty is well tuned enough assuming one is running a halfway decent build.

I mean, the giant orange lines are a pretty good indicator.

I don’t know that fake is quite the right word for it, but spammy mechanics can definitely put you in a situation where the easiest strategy is to ignore the mechanic entirely and zerg the enemy.

If you put on a lot of pressure at once under average conditions, most people are going to go for the path of least resistance (that path either being to quit and do something else, or use the approach that makes it a piece of cake).

For instance, most world bosses are designed such that people can die 500 times in a fight and zerg the thing to death. In theory, they are difficult, but in practice, most of them are just a matter of slamming bodies into them repeatedly until they die. Thus very few people try to take on a world boss without a massive zerg.

HoT has some clever mechanics, many of which are challenging, but once again, zerging undermines most of them. Mainly because if it didn’t, then open world would be a hardcore raid all the time and none but a small percentage would stick around.

Can’t be that you’re doing something wrong, obviously the game is just unfair.

Alexander.6250:

Ayrilana.1396:

I haven’t seen anything that seemed like artifical difficulty other that the migraine mode or perhaps upper tier fractals.

For axe master, you’re supposed to break his bar to prevent that attack. That’s one of the primary mechanics of the fight.

Wich just requires a bunch of people, not more skill. I think anything that is undodgeable,unblockable and pierces invulnerability is just cheap design. You would normally be able to survive this attack? Guess again! Random game mechanic! Your invunerability is no longer valid! They basically change the rules in their own favor.

Actually that scales, so if you’re alone you should be able to break him with 2-3 skills max (which, if you wanna solo him you should prepare beforehand).
My source? Soloing the Pratiarch Wyvern for a looong time in a low pop megaserver, i pretty much kept him from taking flight all the time, untill two more guys arrived and made him scale up, on a Dragonhunter.

I also have to say that i never tagged up or joined a tag for any Hero Challenge, soloed most of them, and those that i didn’t was simply random people showing up, like any other Hero point in the game. Sure some are champions, so they take a while. But then again that’s the same for any other champion you solo in the game.

Whoever runs post HoT fractals knows fake difficulty all too well. I have time to cook dinner during the fight against the grawl shaman or mossman due to their new HP sponges.

The jungle has very little of this artificial difficulty you’re speaking of. It’s mostly just difficult. Mobs do hit hard but usually have strong tells to warn you. Snipers put targets over your heads, Arrowheads make obvious attack patterns, Smokescales say exactly what they do in the description. Pretty much everything will kill you once or twice and after that it’s shame on you for dying to them.

I have rarely felt that my death was out of my control since roaming around the jungle. Running through mobs I have to think about what kind of mob they are and if they will actually kill me. It forces me to sometimes clear mobs instead of just auto walking from one waypoint to another.

Reading the comments here made me realize the term ‘fake difficulty’ may not be the correct term for what I was trying to say. (A better term could be ‘cheap design’ or something) Also I have no problem with the damage from enemies and I don’t think the game is too difficult. My problem is with the way the ‘difficulty increase’ was implemented.

For example I don’t have a problem with evading enemies. But those hylek just ’evade almost every ranged attack just by standing there. I think that is a very cheap way too lenghten fights and compensate for their artificial stupidity.

In HoT mobs do WAY more damage, have WAY more HP, break bars and weight of numbers.

You might call that artificial but not sure what else they could do to keep the vets happy till raids are meta.

They can’t do much about the AI in this engine outside subtle tweaks me thinks and maybe it’s future proofed so they can just scale a few numbers back to make the content easy for scrubs in the future?

fireflyry.7023:

In HoT mobs do WAY more damage, have WAY more HP, break bars and weight of numbers.

You might call that artificial but not sure what else they could do to keep the vets happy till raids are meta.

They can’t do much about the AI in this engine outside subtle tweaks me thinks and maybe it’s future proofed so they can just scale a few numbers back to make the content easy for scrubs in the future?

Actually the ai system in gw2 is capable of a lot more than we see in game. The problem is most enemies only have about 3 possible actions they keep spamming. (If you want to know more about the ai system in gw2, there are some presentations on youtube from the guy who helped improve it.)

Alexander.6250:

Actually the ai system in gw2 is capable of a lot more than we see in game.

I have heard this and seen the videos but have yet to see it implemented in-game.

Would be awesome but maybe it will be the next expac?

When there is no penalty for dying, there’s no reason for the developer to make fights “fair”.

Alexander.6250:

For example I don’t have a problem with evading enemies. But those hylek just ’evade almost every ranged attack just by standing there. I think that is a very cheap way too lenghten fights and compensate for their artificial stupidity.

You mean the hyleks that specifically state in their ability description: evades ranged attacks? You simply don’t range them, just as you don’t melee a smokescale right inside its smoke field. Get in close to the hylek, and it’ll fall in just a few hits. Or just put something reflecting in its path, it’ll shoot itself to death with its own projectile attack before you know it (works wonders on snipers, too, btw ).

Alexander.6250:

For example I don’t have a problem with evading enemies. But those hylek just evade almost every ranged attack just by standing there. I think that is a very cheap way too lengthen fights and compensate for their artificial stupidity.

That’s where I see the flaws too. I find the ‘haha dodge range’ kind of amusing, actually, but it’s a cheap trick with no cost to the enemy. If it had a stamina cost, it would be affected by Weakness, and it would be limited by how often they actually dodge. It would allow for better counter play.
The Hylek knife murderers just need a second tell on their stun-murder attack, and they’d be good, I think.

Smokescales at least have to stay within their circle, and they’re fairly squishy once you reach them. The cooldown on the ability is a tad short, but not game breaking. I actually have few complaints about snipers, either, as long as the mob cluster doesn’t have too many at once.

There are just so many lazy designs that lead to cheap, one-note enemy AI, and that’s why there are accusations of ‘fake’ difficulty. Mushrooms, arrowheads, charging dinos, etc. Chak should fall under lazy AI, and they’re fairly low damage, but you seldom catch them alone, so they’re fine.

There are only two things that I’ve found cheap in the PvE.

1) When it’s a bit laggy and the attack comess faster than the AoE visual you need to dodge the atttack.

2)When mobs reset because of a slight pull, or anything involving the landscape, making them casually walk back while being invulnerable and healing (dat moment of despair… at least make them run… or make them moonwalk to add to the taunt)

The moment where Anet will finally make a interesing stuff and not dps race we have seen in raids etc..https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imdkPyXteGY

I know. Wont happen for obvious reasons.

Tabootrinket.2631:

2)When mobs reset because of a slight pull, or anything involving the landscape, making them casually walk back while being invulnerable and healing (dat moment of despair… at least make them run… or make them moonwalk to add to the taunt)

I’m with you on that one. Even knowing that reset will happen I still find myself habitually pulling and using the terrain to my advantage because it feels natural only to get frustrated when the enemy starts walking back to its leash area. I’ve read dev posts on why that leash mechanic is necessary and I get it – but it’s still very frustrating.

On the topic of difficulty, I was curious if anyone had tips for fighting the veteran bristlebacks. Sometimes they don’t give me any problem, but other times that channeled bleed attack they do locks onto me. I dodge, it’s still channeling. I dodge again, it’s still channeling. I use a weapon skill to evade or block, it’s still channeling. I go down and try to use bandage, it’s still channeling. That attack just keeps going, and going, and going…

Brake bars = fake difficulty. Taking away half your skills, gg ANet.

BrotherBelial.3094:

Brake bars = fake difficulty. Taking away half your skills, gg ANet.

Only fake difficulty from break bar is Axemaster.

Uh no , not the issue about cc or 1 shot but after break his bar he will disappear forever from the screen of people who don’t have stealth detection. So the rest of the crew have to randomly swing a sword till he die or he successfully do that 1 shot again.

Didn’t kill him for sometimes and I already got stealth detection, might get fix.
But that’s what I call fake difficulty.

Break bars are not fake difficulty. I also do not see how Axemaster has fake difficulty in the fight. You break his bar periodically to prevent a devastating attack. How is that fake difficulty? How’s it any different from using CC anywhere else in the game to interrupt an attack? I suppose in PvP that having to inerrupt a player’s attack or DPS rotation is fake difficulty?

There’s also nothing wrong about having masteries required, or recommended, for encounters. I suppose the final encounter where you have to fly up into the air to avoid the ground AoE is fake difficulty?

Essentially what I am seeing is anything that goes beyond the the typical Zerg/world boss meta of stacking and mashing skills is fake difficulty.

Sounds like a L2P issue to me. I actually treat endurance as a resource now, and swap weapons not just when it’s convenient to maintain efficient use of cooldowns, but also when condition stacks are highest to get the most use out of condition clear effects. The choice of whether to straight up EZ roll out of significant damage, or swap to my sword and leap to reset my position and condition waves is just an example of how much more I tend to think about what I’m doing. I think it’s brilliant.

And you know, it is okay to NOT engage every enemy you see.

It is also okay to slightly tweak your build if you are going to face a particularly difficult mob.

It is okay to carry more than one armor type and not rely entirely on Zerker.

Rasimir.6239:

Alexander.6250:

For example I don’t have a problem with evading enemies. But those hylek just ’evade almost every ranged attack just by standing there. I think that is a very cheap way too lenghten fights and compensate for their artificial stupidity.

You mean the hyleks that specifically state in their ability description: evades ranged attacks? You simply don’t range them, just as you don’t melee a smokescale right inside its smoke field. Get in close to the hylek, and it’ll fall in just a few hits. Or just put something reflecting in its path, it’ll shoot itself to death with its own projectile attack before you know it (works wonders on snipers, too, btw ).

Thanks for this info…I am just now starting through the HoT content and have been doing my due diligence on fight mechanics of different mobs to see what gear set I would be better off using.

This makes it much easier…I thank you. :=)

Ayrilana.1396:

I personally don’t see an issue with timers but that’s just me.

It’s lazy. Instead of coming up with actual mechanics, they just slap on a timer and call it ‘challenging’.

MashMash.1645:

Ayrilana.1396:

I personally don’t see an issue with timers but that’s just me.

It’s lazy. Instead of coming up with actual mechanics, they just slap on a timer and call it ‘challenging’.

The problem is that if you remove timers, what’s to prevent players just slapping on as much vitality and toughness as they can so they can whittle down a boss? How is that challenging? Timers encourage players to play efficiently.

Ayrilana.1396:

MashMash.1645:

Ayrilana.1396:

I personally don’t see an issue with timers but that’s just me.

It’s lazy. Instead of coming up with actual mechanics, they just slap on a timer and call it ‘challenging’.

The problem is that if you remove timers, what’s to prevent pkayers just slapping on as much vitality and toughness as they can so they can whittle down a boss? How is that challenging? Timers encourage players to play efficiently.

And why is “efficiency” the most important thing?

You can add mechanics other than time pressure. Their are lots of other options.

MashMash.1645:

Ayrilana.1396:

MashMash.1645:

Ayrilana.1396:

I personally don’t see an issue with timers but that’s just me.

It’s lazy. Instead of coming up with actual mechanics, they just slap on a timer and call it ‘challenging’.

The problem is that if you remove timers, what’s to prevent pkayers just slapping on as much vitality and toughness as they can so they can whittle down a boss? How is that challenging? Timers encourage players to play efficiently.

And why is “efficiency” the most important thing?

You can add mechanics other than time pressure. Their are lots of other options.

I never said it was the most important thing. Finding and executing a strategy to beat a boss within a time limit can be challenging and it adds in the factor of possible failure.

Mechanics like what?

So raids came out today, and man what a joke! The only really difficult part of the first boss encounter (not including finding 9 people who aren’t total idiots) is the part where if you get unlucky the green circle will spawn in the damaging area and on the point furthest away from the boss… If you get lucky its faceroll if u get unlucky you wipe, how is rng driven difficulty like that ever a good idea?

Raids as far as I’ve seen are a prime example of what I think is wrong in the game’s design The first boss and the 3 minions before him are useless damage sponges who do NOTHING but just stand there. Then they throw in a load of ‘game mechanics’ and a timer to make it challenging, and just copy paste that stuff with higher numbers for the boss.
Anything beyond running to the green circles is a faceroll damage race just like we’re used to.

ArchonWing.9480:

Well, in any case, I think the difficulty is well tuned enough assuming one is running a halfway decent build.

I mean, the giant orange lines are a pretty good indicator.

Assuming you are going 1v1 sure but there are plenty of group events.

1) long range
2) excessive duration (one sniper can have at least two of these on the ground at the same time)
3) high damage

also usable from stealth

1) you can be fighting something else while someone is fighting the sniper and end up being collateral damage for the other fight
2) the ground can be covered with enough that there is basically no place to stand
3) would be fine if not for the other two

oh and Champion Axemaster Gwyllion hits you for 2,297,500 damage using Headshot. … while facing away from you with an animation that looks like he is charging up an melee attack since he was holding up an axe(actually it looked more like he was shivering while holding up his axe) -_-

Labjax.2465:

Thus very few people try to take on a world boss without a massive zerg.

Also because megaserver forces you unless you time your entrance into the map JUST right.

EsarioOne.9840:

Whoever runs post HoT fractals knows fake difficulty all too well. I have time to cook dinner during the fight against the grawl shaman or mossman due to their new HP sponges.

At what scale? Highest I’ve fought him was at 41 and he was okay(even though he had every boon in the game on him all the time) but based on https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Upcoming-Fractal-Changes/5756042 any direct damage builds will be in a bad spot at higher scales until the changes mentioned in that post takes place. In the 41-50 range any crit based build is just awful.

I agree completely. My ranger is by far my best character and has the best equipment. Yet she has a very difficult time with some of them. It’s really hard to hit when you can’t hit and you can’t interrupt and your character loses focus and stops shooting every half-second. It’s absurdly hard in the new zones. It’s like playing a completely different game.

I am much more critical of time gating things to make a small expansion seem larger.

Rauderi.8706:

Arrowhead side-roll.
Charging knockdown mushrooms, dinosaurs, and cavaliers.

Ranged weapons exists for a reason…
Not all threats can be solve with a greatsword.

Anet has been guilty of using “fake difficulty” since Flame and Frost and Sky pirates… and has been adding more and more of it as time goes on.

When i use the term fake difficulty i mean instead of making something challenging, (where you force players to learn a new mechanic, or do something outside the box) something is made unnecessarily difficult simply to prevent it from being facerolled.

If Anet doesn’t do this, we get the same old stack in the corner faceroll pve we have been accustomed to since launch.

Honestly I’m on the fence about the whole thing.

Some encounters really do need to shake things up a bit…

…but implementing encounters that blatantly ignore mechanics already in place… or follow no logical pattern is no way to do that.

Over inflating enemy health pools, adding unnecessary periods of invulnerability, adding more cheap 1-shot kills, adding attacks that ignore things such as block, stability, reflect, or invulnerability… are all things Anet is guilty of doing in order to provide the illusion of challenge.

Take the shooting gallery adventure in HoT for example.

Unless, by some stroke of luck, the planets are all aligned properly….. you will find yourself bashing your face into a wall attempting to complete this with a gold rating.

Why?

Targets are randomized near the end, and can spawn so far away from you that you are forced to take several seconds to even get to a location where the target is not obstructed.

How is that good design?

Well in Anet’s eyes…. whatever keeps people playing for longer is a good thing.

…but in the players’ eyes its a completely unnecessary issue that makes the task almost impossible unless the RNG is perfect.

I’m with you OP.

The only Fake Difficulty in the game is insane hitpoints for bosses. Instead of making cool attack mechanics, all they did is put 1 billion Hitpoints on the bosses and call it a day.

ArchonWing.9480:

The only one listed that counts IMO listed is probably the canopy champion axemaster that can just kill you just because. Everything else can be countered simply on good reactions. The hylek stealth guys are just really hard, not fake difficulty. If you could have reasonably gotten away, then it’s no longer the game’s fault.

Gotta agree about the axeman; if he did 99% of your health and you could die from absolutely anything hitting you, it’d make more game sense, but knocking you straight into a downed state (rather than just all-out killing you) is just an insult.

As to the hylek stealth guys, usually I’m not actually hurt by them so much as inconvenienced. Seriously, I can take them down in maybe ten hits without losing more than… say… 25% health, but they just vanish and loiter invisibly for ages. If they just teleported, sure, that’d make sense. I thought the whole idea was that they were frogs and were jumping (and that the invis was just a cheap animation cop-out), but I can’t tell.

Swift.1930:

As to the hylek stealth guys, usually I’m not actually hurt by them so much as inconvenienced. Seriously, I can take them down in maybe ten hits without losing more than… say… 25% health, but they just vanish and loiter invisibly for ages. If they just teleported, sure, that’d make sense. I thought the whole idea was that they were frogs and were jumping (and that the invis was just a cheap animation cop-out), but I can’t tell.

You can see them with Nuhoch Stealth mastery.

There are some mobs that at first sight might look like fake difficutly but almost any mobs (there are exceptions maybe) have a proper counter strategy or player class/build to them. So that is perfectly fine.

The things of totally pointless and annoying artificial difficulty in my view are these:

- far too high exp requirements on the higher tier masteries… lower ones and point costs are fine… the last stretch xp grind on lvl 5+6 though is just boring tedious uncreative

- raid boss enrage timer.. cheap old solution for outdated equip-up-games entirely unneeded in GW2. the boss mechanics are fun and well balanced no need for this catnip at all other than to make people discriminate against others in group forming for no other reason as havin exotic instead of ascended gear event when objectively unneeded. totally foreseeable and a major hit to “have fun your friends in the difficult content yout like”. The “ping gear or get out” fun is on the rise again.

- timed post-meta loot grabbing with fear of being disconnected on top with no means to return kinda is just not fun. fix this. When someone qualifies for a meta-instances loot-phase room. Put people into a seperate instance where only those tha qualified can join in and will be able to rejoin after disconnect properly. Also up that instances map time to at leasst 1 hour or until all peeps left.

While the difficulty is overall in a good spot. Some totally unfun unneeeded artificial key components will start to make a considerable negative impact on quality of group player and make some of the unobjective yet popular discrimination on group set up rise again.
So one of the key features of this game is in danger of once again being shot dead especially on the raid content edge: To play with the people you want not the ones that bring that super-tedious to make 5 different ascended catnip sets. Not because they are ultimately needed but because everyone foreseeable got that earlier very unfortunate raid designer comment into the wrong ear.
I refer to the comment about raid encounters to be balanced towards ascended gear.
With that unfortunate statement you have set the predicament to the new “all-asc-or-gtfo”. So this part of the game is not GW2 anymore where you pick people you want, instead the group picking is now the same egoistical crap as in any other game with their actual equip-up-brickwall designs. People that don’t have it yet won’t magically make those sets of ascended equipment over night as those are heavily gated by real time dailies, time investment, super RNG or the golden credit card.

So you really need to think about something to do to fix how you yourself shot dead the best and only aspect exclusive to GW2: Being and all-inclusive game for group content for the majority of players.
Your choice of communicating raid requirements and to add timed dps-checking actually has put only one concept into people’s minds: “This is now WoW action combat style”

Ayrilana.1396:

MashMash.1645:

Ayrilana.1396:

I personally don’t see an issue with timers but that’s just me.

It’s lazy. Instead of coming up with actual mechanics, they just slap on a timer and call it ‘challenging’.

The problem is that if you remove timers, what’s to prevent players just slapping on as much vitality and toughness as they can so they can whittle down a boss? How is that challenging? Timers encourage players to play efficiently.

You mean everyone play zerker right? that’s what timers do in this game.

Alexander.6250:

Does anyone else also think that Anet made way too much use of so called ‘Fake Difficulty’ to make HoT more challenging? (Fake Difficulty = adding unfair elements to increase difficulty or just plain boosting numbers to compensate for lacking AI)

Whenever a situation becomes ‘difficult’ in the game. I can’t help but feel the difficulty is artificial or unfair.

Let’s take the hylek shadowleapers for example. They wouldn’t be so annoying if not for their random invulnerability. Or those hero points where you have to kill a boss would be less tedious if we didn’t have to slaughter a damage sponge. Or the kitten ‘headshot’ attack from that one champion axemaster in the canopy that just downs you no matter what. These just don’t feel like they require more skill to beat, just more time or greater numbers of players…

IMO improving the AI would be a way better method of raising difficulty. Enemies that can evade oae’s ,intentionally transfer or cure conditions at the right times and smart positioning would be huge improvements. The game has the technology to do that kind of things, it’s just only used very rarely (or ineffectively)

Does anyone else feel this way, or am I just expecting too much?

I agree with this somewhat. I do like the improvement they have given to some of the new enemies in HoT. However it is still lacking compared to GW1. Enemies in GW1 could transfer conditions, clear them or use skills to mitigate things such as protection.

I agree with overpowering an enemy just to make them harder a cheap tactic. It feels like a lazy way to increase difficulty rather than trying to program in more diverse combat.

I’d rather have a longer fight with an enemy who can transfer conditions, clear them, etc, than with an enemy who deals an op amount of damage and a short fight.

Of course it’s fake diffculty

If you want real difficulty then you’d need more trinity elements

Unblockable, unavoidable, and even unforseen damage is a staple of MMO’s but that’s because other MMO’s have the trinity. This game is nothing but DPS so of course its all going to be cheap difficulty. You can’t have something akin to Dark Souls when you have a 50 peep zerg. You can however have it when you funnel people into roles that which can’t be blocked must be healed and that which can’t avoided must be blocked while that which can’t be seen just requires more burn.

Your not reliant on anyone but yourself in this game and that’s what the difficulty has to be capped at which is rather low compared to other games. You can do so much more when a boss demands teamwork and a timer isn’t needed at all when all those avenues are open.

This is gw2 though so cheapness is it as anything that attacks more than you can dodge or wipes people trying to rally an ally instantly becomes cheap but it’s the only way aside HP to make it difficult.