Utterly agreed.
The final episode is lousy when it comes to handling player deaths. I play weekly with the same group of three other friends, and the simple fact is that we’re not likely to complete the HoT PS in its current form.
Before the boss, there are multiple places where you can fall or be knocked back to your death, ending up just watching the (boring) scenery around you while the rest of the party progress the story that YOU aren’t going to get to see – and the only way to get back into the fight seems to be for the party to wipe. Way too harsh in as extended and important an episode as the final one of the PS.
And the “prison” mechanism of the final fight – again, way too harsh considering how easy it is (especially on your first encounter with the boss) to get killed by not getting into the air in time. And don’t bother wiping to get imprisoned party members back, because you’ll simply go straight back to the start of the fight, and have to start again.
Of our four players, I’d say that two are never going to be the greatest MMO players in the world (and I’ve lost track of the number of times that one of them in particular has taken a wrong turn or died “embarrassingly”) – but then, they’re “causal” players, the weekly sessions are pretty much the only time they play GW2, and we have fun playing and progressing together. The other two of us are more regular players; we have our own strengths and weaknesses, like anyone, but we’re probably good enough to be classified at least as “average”. And we’ve progressed as a group through the HoT PS to the final episode, and enjoyed doing so. But it’s plain to me that we’re not, as a group, going to complete it in its current form, because the mechanism for getting into the air in the “electrification” stages is simply too hit and miss, and the penalty for failing is way too high and too unfair – and I know my friends well enough to also know that, as a group, we’re simply not going to keep grinding away at the episode in hopes that, eventually, we’ll actually fluke out and manage to keep one of us alive long enough to actually finish Mordremoth.
The simple fact is that I hoped ANet had learned from the first PS, but they haven’t. Just like the original PS final episode, the HoT final episode is mistuned. Yes, it’s the final episode of the PS, so it needs to feel “special”. But it seems ANet designers think that “special” and “hard” are synonyms, and nothing could be farther from the truth – this is not a fractal or a dungeon, only meant for people to run through repeatedly with a set of strangers until they know its detail inside-out – it’s the climax of our PS, and precisely because it’s the final episode of our journeys, we all deserve the reward of being actually able to complete it for ourselves – which includes solo if we choose – and, especially, without the indignity of having to feel that we were simply carried though on the backs of others, because we weren’t up to the challenge. Nothing wrong with having a “hard” mode with bigger rewards – but give us PS content that we can actually complete and enjoy, please. And remove the walls of that stupid prison.
