Guild Wars 2

I enjoy difficult mobs but there are several issues I can see with trash mobs hitting that hard.

It’s inconsistent with the rest of the game.
It’s not consistent to have trash mobs hitting harder than most champions or harder to kill than half a dozen of Orrians.
I usually enjoy when I can fight a pack of 12-15 trash mobs and I die more often when fighting half that many modrems.
I recently took 16K DPS from a trio of them (with 3K armor).

It may seems paradoxical but having trash hitting too hard does indeed penalises defensive builds and therefore reinforce the already dominant offensive builds.
You need to kill these mobs before doing a fatal mistake, and the best way is killing them very fast.
It’s not really useful to have high toughness, vitality and healing when the enemies are hitting too hard.

The addition of (ridiculous) healing mobs (the troll model suits them well I guess) and healing mechanism make it even more penalising for defensive builds.

The areas generating damage over time or the Husks models are the only things I saw that tend to favour more defensive builds.

Open PvE needs more models with high toughness, immunity to critical hits, retaliation, ripostes, adds, Pulls, resistances to range damage, resistances to AoE damage, scaling up, etc.

Mobs hitting for high values only reinforce the berserker zerg.
“Nuke em from orbit from the bus” should not be the systematic best solution.

The Lich from Mad King’s Labyrinth that generate adds who are using Retaliation is a formidable example of something that does kill the berserker zerg but can be soloed.
The game needs more stuff like that.

Mordrems are nice, but their DPS is slightly too high, and their capacity to counter high adverse DPS is lacking.

Ayochak.8293:

I enjoy difficult mobs but there are several issues I can see with trash mobs hitting that hard.

It’s inconsistent with the rest of the game.
It’s not consistent to have trash mobs hitting harder than most champions or harder to kill than half a dozen of Orrians.
I usually enjoy when I can fight a pack of 12-15 trash mobs and I die more often when fighting half that many modrems.
I recently took 16K DPS from a trio of them (with 3K armor).

So because the rest of the game have a difficulty scale too low, they shouldn’t put harder mobs? Ok, they could make current mobs harder a bit, then put mobs like Mordrem. But in 1 months most ppl will be use to Mordrem and nobody will complain about the difficulty.

When the game was launched, AC was view as too hard. A lot of group couldn’t do some part and most run take long in pugs. When they changed AC a while back, ppl complain that the dungeon was now too difficult for nothing. Do you hear those kind of complain much now? No. Ppl will get use to it and will deploy ways to fight them more efficiently.

My solution with the latest patch:

Lay there dead while your companions (Rox etc.) defeat the bosses. They don’t res you, but you still get the completion and who doesn’t need a snack now and again.

the main problem are tendrils ranged attacks. they spam ridiculous dmg with like no cd…and for story parts, useless npc are the annoyance. no aggro, no dmg, no utility. actually even worse than ranger pets.

Thaddeus mobs hitting harder are just one kind of many possible difficulty increases, what I’m saying is that it’s not a good one in itself.
You can make things difficult but also more balanced and more interesting.

For instance troll insect attack is around 1K DPS per swarm, it’s a lot since you get several swarms, and the best way to deal with it is… killing the troll very fast.
Now if the swarms were dealing half that damage but with larger area of effect, impairing conditions and blocking ranged attacks I think they would be more difficult and more interesting to fight.

Mobs could hit much harder. It’s kind of boring play warrior when you don’t really need dodge at all.

i have no problem with sw enemys, i can solo champs and escort dollys alone, easy. Build zerker power necro.

I agree with you OP.

Plus add ridiculous lag (and a stupid camera) to the mix and it’s not long before you’re was armorless and getting one hitted. Yeah, I got it done but it was annoying rather than fun.

Frankly, I am at the point that I don’t want to bother with silverwastes/drytop or this story anymore.

The only character of mine that has had any major issues has been my guardian. I absolutely loathe fighting these things with my guardian. I went soldier quite a few months back with greatsword and the new content is so unforgiving to a guardian it gets stupidly frustrating. My zerker ranger and warrior and my p/p zerker thief got through without too much trouble.

It’s kind of disappointing. I’ve spent a lot of time building the character and ANet wants to push the game in a direction of more frustration. It doesn’t hurt too much though, I often join up with friends to just complete it with help. Having a full party makes it an absolute breeze.

My recommendation, OP, is ask your guild to join you. Any guild that’s unwilling to chip in a little bit for someone who’s not very good at the game doesn’t really deserve to have you as a member – it’s just a game, after all…a game with a really good story. People want to enjoy the story to the best of their ability.

I think the problem is most mobs are spawning as level 83-84. Those scaled up are hitting a bit too hard. Just before the patch, a champ poison whipped me for 16k. The only way I could have avoided all the red would have been to double dodge. Which I didn’t have enough endurance to do. So, I was insta-dead instead. Really wasn’t a fun or interesting fight that way.

Those tendril’s with the pulls and stuns was just trolly of the dev’s. Seriously, they were trolly and you know it

Yeah the scaling gets weird. I can understand scaling in numbers, or scaling in levels, as either makes it so that people need to cooperate. But scaling both? That just leads to a curb stomp if someone get more than one mob on them.

At this point in time i think there are 3 independent scaling mechanisms in action, and they interact to make the difficulty spike exponentially.

We have scale by numbers. In that a wave contains more mobs if there are more characters present.

We also have level scaling on the mobs so that more people are needed to take down the individual mob.

And on top of that we get rank scaling, where waves replace grunts with veterans, elites and champions at some ratio.

And in the end these end up overlapping so that if you hit the perfect storm you get multiple champs that can take on a zerg and hit like nuclear weapons.

Cuddy.6247:

The only character of mine that has had any major issues has been my guardian. I absolutely loathe fighting these things with my guardian.

Wow. It is the other way round with me. I have no problem with my guardian because she can remove conditions easily and has essentially permaburn. I have problems with my ele and slight problems with my warrior (ok, no real problems but my guardian does it better). I tried it with two guardians, one is full berserker, one is half pvt, half berserker.

Claudius.5381:

Cuddy.6247:

The only character of mine that has had any major issues has been my guardian. I absolutely loathe fighting these things with my guardian.

Wow. It is the other way round with me. I have no problem with my guardian because she can remove conditions easily and has essentially permaburn. I have problems with my ele and slight problems with my warrior (ok, no real problems but my guardian does it better). I tried it with two guardians, one is full berserker, one is half pvt, half berserker.

Part of me wants to switch to a berserker build for my guardian just to deal with this story – but that’s a hell of a lot of money to dump down on something that I don’t necessarily want, plus I’ve been using the build I have for nearly 2 years. I just don’t want to invest in the enormous change my guardian has. I can imagine ele would be an absolute pain (unless perhaps you go with Zerk/Soldier fire staff – 6/2/0/2/4 or something). I just…blah. I had so much fun with my guardian prior to these updates, while my warrior and ranger are just able to seamlessly wreck everything so fast there’s no real threat to defend against.

phoenix.3465:

Harder should mean smarter enemies that use player abilities like a player would, not overpowered monster abilities that one-shot and have no cooldown at all.

Programming the AI to do that isn’t as easy as it seems, with so many factors to consider and take into account of, its far more feasible to keep the AI for non-unique npc’s and enemies fairly simple. That means keeping their skill set at a level the AI can manage, in practice that means only 2 or 3 skills, short cooldowns to make up for the lack skill variety. Fairly high damage to add a little difficulty to every encounter thereby encouraging you to use strategy, it is indeed more difficult than what you may have encountered before but not difficult enough that the tools you currently have at your disposal are insufficient to the task. The high health pool is to account for us the player, we exploit weaknesses and play in various unpredictable ways. The AI can’t keep up so the health pool is high to maintain that level of difficulty within the limitations of what that AI can do to counter or react to our actions.

Besides a fairly dim-witted AI is actually a better thing than you’d think, we read telegraphed attacks, note patterns and behaviour to survive some of these encounters. If the AI fought as we do (dynamically), considering the numbers they through at us you’d be in a far worse position than you are now. Also consider having to run AI that powerful for every different type of enemy … It may not seem like it but this is really the lesser of two evils.

I enjoy these fights! You are pushed to work together even with random people which is good…

I have to work my kitty off to survive and kill those kittens but I can solo defence/escort. But it’s much-much easier to fight in party (and so it should be…).

FYI: D/D ele knight/soldier/celestial 06206 with Lightning Rod.

phoenix.3465:

I understand the need to make endgame content harder, but these Mordrem are not fun to fight at all. There is no margin for error at all, massive damage, trails that instantly kill you if you get downed in them, constant poison makes it impossible to heal, torment makes it impossible to run. And to top it all off, everything that’s not a white mob has tons of health.

Welcome to World vs. World.

I’m diggin the new difficulty to be honest.