Guild Wars 2

EDIT: Thank you for the changes to the final fight. By the looks of the patch notes, it will be much more bearable. The following post was how I felt prior to the changes and is no longer relevant.

As someone who enjoys challenging content. Someone who intentionally plays vanilla builds in WvW/PvP because she both genuinely prefers the vanilla builds and because she enjoys that it makes fights more difficult. And someone who is always most interested in video games that don’t hold your hand (a Dark Souls/Soul series veteran, Dragon’s Dogma lover, Act Raiser and Super Meat Boy fan)…

That final fight and a number of other fights in the Living World stories prior to this one was awful (yes, I believe “was” is grammatically correct).

It is not difficult. It’s artificial difficulty and it’s nothing short of obnoxious. There’s no way to avoid/negate every CC that’s thrown at you unless you build full tank. In which case the fight will take all day and even then, I’m sure you’ll still get slapped around like an Irish nanny at least a couple times.

A challenging encounter is when you immediately recognize your mistakes and learn from them. Either you understand what punished you or you allow yourself to be hurt again so you can observe and memorize the tells.

Having so much crap thrown at you that it becomes a matter of RNG whether you’re hurt or not isn’t difficulty. It’s artificial difficulty and that’s the worst kind because it doesn’t make you a better player. Maybe some people will enjoy it but they won’t approach the fight differently the second time.

I appreciate that Guild Wars 2 is a free to play game and that there’s so much quality content. Don’t get me wrong, I love this game, but fights like this have to stop… Enough with the CC spam, very few people like it and no one gets better by being exposed to it.

I legitimately cringe at the thought of future Living World bosses because of how consistently bad they’ve been. The new maps, the story, visuals, everything is great but holy mother of Grenth, please consider not turning your dear Tyrians in to pin balls… Especially as someone who has been a Necromancer for the last 3 years, I can tell you from the bottom of my heart, I’ve had plenty enough of being knocked around, thanks.

Be thankful that, like me, you’re a Necromancer We at least could finish the fight!
Some other classes have has more difficulty.

I enjoyed the final fight due to the challenge, but you make a good point. Unless a player can learn to do better, a challenge is not necessarily fun or rewarding. I didn’t mind the amount of CCs, damage, or AoE presented in the final fight, but I have two primary complaints:

1) small room with poor camera angles. Dying because you can’t see your surroundings is not fun.
2) Unblockable CCs. The volume of CC thrown at the player in this fight is so great that making some of them unblockable will strictly limit the ability of some builds and even some professions to complete it reasonably.

For reference, I played this fight using Revenant, and I died 2-3 of times. I spent most of the fight dodging around, blocking, and waiting on heals to come off of cooldown so I could recover. I’m okay with this (except the waiting on cooldowns part), but I understand this fight could be easier or harder for different professions. I used Shiro so I had plenty of access to dodges. I enjoyed the fight because many conflicts in solo PvE GW2 involve one of three boring things:
a) HP sponge mobs (usually champion) whose damage is easily avoided
b) weak mobs whose mechanics don’t matter
c) rote mechanics which once learned trivialize the fight, and before learning make the fight nearly impossible
I liked this fight because it pushed the player’s awareness and reaction speed, and there were no simple ‘tricks’ to learn to make it trivial.

Regardless, I think it’s very clear that GW2 sorely needs difficulty settings for personal story content. I can’t imagine playing this battle on Necromancer with poor access to dodges, blocks, or invulnerabilities. I don’t think ANet should make the professions so homogeneous that they all perform similarly, so I think difficulty settings are the next best option. If the build or profession I want to play excels at a particular mission, then I can turn up the difficulty for a challenge; if my profession is a poor fit, I can dial it down. And either way, the content will be challenging. For the interest of the lore, the Commander shouldn’t be hopelessly outlclassed, but neither should this final story boss be trivially weak. Multiple difficulty settings is perhaps the most effective way to allow this.

I didn’t find it that difficult, to be honest, as dodging seemed to work most of the time. But then again I played as a Viper Ranger and maybe my pet tanked a lot of the damage. Will check back once I played that part with my Revenant.

I haven’t gotten to that fight yet, but thanks for the notice.

It seems ANet’s CC fetish is still in full effect.

I don’t understand how a reasonable game designer can look at an encounter design like that and say that it’s remotely fair or balanced. …I don’t even have to be referring to the specific final boss of the patch. I could point out several encounters that are similar.

I agree that the CC chaining and bad camera angles are annoying in this fight. When the add spawned I didn’t know to expect it and found myself pushed into a wall, unable to see what was going on as I was repeatedly stunned.

All in all, a pretty challenging encounter for a storyline boss. But I suppose that’s worthy of the “Head of the Snake”. Still, I would have preferred to fight this guy in a more open environment!

It was very easy, but the camera did mess with my head and put strain on my eyes!

I’ve played in my berserker gear, and all I had to do was press Special ability in time and avoid all the circles and telegraphic attacks. Interesting fight, medium difficulty, I had fun!

I was able to win it as a Mesmer, but it was hideously obnoxious because the small room meant I was constantly getting CC. Especially when the jade bow and armor came up, I couldn’t distance myself like I normally would.

Camera issues have been a known problem in the game since day 1, yet In the same patch that they removed a roof of the Khylo pvp map – ‘The Clock Tower has had its roof removed to improve visibility and camera behavior.’ they design a boss fight that requires lots of evasion and total awareness of your surroundings, in a small enclosed room.

Enough Said.

Mikali.9651:

all I had to do was press Special ability in time and avoid all the circles and telegraphic attacks. Interesting fight, medium difficulty, I had fun!

I think most people keep missing the importance of using the Special Skill during certain fights. It’s there for a reason.

Ashantara.8731:

Mikali.9651:

all I had to do was press Special ability in time and avoid all the circles and telegraphic attacks. Interesting fight, medium difficulty, I had fun!

I think most people keep missing the importance of using the Special Skill during certain fights. It’s there for a reason.

The problem with the special skill is that the time you have to press it is significantly shorter than the time you have to dodge red circles or respond to any other game mechanic. It’s under 1 second. If you have even the slightest bit of lag you have no shot.

This last fight is not even fun, fighting in such a confined space with the camera going haywire all through the fight and so much aoe and timed counter magic is just frustrating.

No skill will get you through this fight only luck, it’s just badly designed.

I will echo others in saying that it’s more frustrating than challenging. Small space combined with one-shot mechanics makes for a bad combination.

The fight is just annoying, every aspect of it.

And it’s all fake difficulty.

Get hit by a jade bow knockback missile you don’t see coming, because the Jade is standing behind giant Caudecus. Get wedged between the wall and a crate. Struggle to get back into a position where the camera will actually show you something relevant but don’t make it before you’re dead. Struggling with atrocious camera behavior shouldn’t be what makes a fight hard.

Also, getting ganked by 3 bandit snipers you didn’t see spawn in and going from nearly full health to downed in zero point 5 seconds? Not enjoyable. Waiting for the NPCs to clear out those bandits before jumping back into the action because you’re too annoyed to even want to bother doing it yourself? What the hell is the point of it all?

My problem is that it’s all AoE, all CC, and somehow the options given to you (the protection spell) feels useless because it doesn’t really give you anything. If you don’t cast it, you get CC’d, but if you do cast it, you still get CC’d regardless.

Oh and a Veteran Bow spawns, and it loves to CC too.

As a necro, I beat the fight on my first attempt, but it was a chore

The knockbacks weren’t bad till a Jade showed up, then it was crazy unfair.

But the worse offender was it being in such a small room and fighting the camera. Couldn’t see to dodge at times as my camera was constantly adjusting. If it was slightly bigger, I don’t think it would’ve been as bad.

I did as a berserk reaper btw

Colly.4073:

Lahmia.2193:

Colly.4073:

No skill will get you through this fight only luck, it’s just badly designed.

Kind of insulting to the players who managed it with relative ease. And hypocritical considering your reply to Auburn.2456. It was an interesting fight that kept you on your toes but nothing to write home about.

Relative ease depending on what class you play!

And how you play it. Gotta adapt to the situation. If there’s a tonne of CC bring stability and stun breaks. If there’s a lot of aoe, bring blocks/evades or vigor.

Colly.4073:

This last fight is not even fun, fighting in such a confined space with the camera going haywire all through the fight and so much aoe and timed counter magic is just frustrating.

No skill will get you through this fight only luck, it’s just badly designed.

Well, let’s be honest. Call it skill or call it practice, I feel confident that players can train themselves to prioritize use of the special on this encounter. As with anything else, you practice and you learn. You begin to learn the timing so you know roughly when to expect the special to become available and you watch for the visual and auditory cues that indicate that you need to use it.

As avoiding a CC chain is the primary challenge of this encounter, you can also give yourself an edge by adding survival gear (since DPS is really only the major factor when fighting the relatively weak, but dangerous adds) and by adding stun breaks and stability to your bar.

I don’t think “luck” is really a factor here. You just need to prioritize using that special as soon as possible and giving yourself enough of a cushion for the tougher parts of the encounter (jade bow, primarily).

The game also gives you some fallback plans in the form of the NPCs that actually raise you when downed and the fact that you can always bring friends if all else fails. Ideal? Perhaps not, but this is Caudecus we’re fighting. He’s a powerful and important character and he isn’t going to go down without a fight!

Realistically the problem is that there’s a lot of people who would be perfectly happy with a ‘press F to execute caudecus’ prompt, and anything more difficult than that just makes the encounter progressively more aggravating. There’s really no pleasing those players unless the encounter is so easy that you don’t need to even think about it.

Problem is that gw2 caters pretty heavily to these players, so you can’t just ignore them. IMO this is the situation where a challenge mote would be appropriate. Lock some achievement points and a nice title behind doing it the proper way and let the other folks have their ‘press 1 to win’ fight as they want it.

Fay.2357:

Realistically the problem is that there’s a lot of people who would be perfectly happy with a ‘press F to execute caudecus’ prompt, and anything more difficult than that just makes the encounter progressively more aggravating. There’s really no pleasing those players unless the encounter is so easy that you don’t need to even think about it.

Problem is that gw2 caters pretty heavily to these players, so you can’t just ignore them. IMO this is the situation where a challenge mote would be appropriate. Lock some achievement points and a nice title behind doing it the proper way and let the other folks have their ‘press 1 to win’ fight as they want it.

I would prefer a nice middle ground like dungeon bosses or encounters from season two.

To those who say “git gud”/“L2P” etc., or that they found the fight easy – I thought I made it clear in the OP that this fight isn’t difficult, it’s artificially difficult. There’s a big difference.

I did this fight on a semi-tank Warrior and I didn’t die at all, though I did down a couple times getting greedy. The fight wasn’t complicated or hard, it was annoying. It was annoying that I was being punished for things I couldn’t avoid/couldn’t see and it didn’t teach me through example. It’s like giving your dog a treat for doing something right and scolding it for doing something wrong versus giving it a treat for no reason and scolding it for no reason. It’s not going to stop crapping on your carpet if you’re not scolding it when it does.

Those of you that it was easy for had good RNG. Hate to break it to you, it isn’t skill. There are no amount of evades or Stability stacks that can prevent every CC in that fight unless a) you end it in under 60 seconds or b) RNG is on your side and you’re not hit while you’re trying to DPS.

There are lots of encounters like this in other games that teach you nothing and are poorly designed. There’s nothing “wrong” per-se with doing this, it’s just lazy is all. If people are asking for more difficult fights in GW2, give them more difficult fights, not gimmicks. I’ve seen enough comments that agree with me when I say many people came out of that fight not feeling good about it. Most just decided they wouldn’t do it a second time.

So again to clarify, I didn’t find this fight hard. I found it cheap and crappily designed because I was being punished when I shouldn’t have been and rewarded when I shouldn’t have been.

Anyway /end rant. I’m not angry about any of this, I just felt it was necessary to add my opinion to the growing list of others who didn’t enjoy this encounter. Perhaps ANet will try to design some actual difficult fights in the future rather relying on gimmicks. I know they’re capable of doing it and I’d like to see it happen.

Worst boss in the entire game imo. I feel there was little thought that was giving into the design of this spam fest. It’s compounded by the little window to use your special skill contrasting with lag. At time’s it only blinks and it’s already too late.

I feel sorry for SEA players who deal with lag on a constant basis. As there would be almost zero chance to use that special skill to negate getting into a stun lock.

If it weren’t for the small window for that special skill getting you into a heap load of trouble, and unable to tell whats going on your screen. I wouldn’t of minded this boss battle.

I still enjoyed this fight (with the exception of a few points in my post above), though I appear to be in the minority, or those others who enjoyed it do not say so in the forums. I will attempt to compare this fight to conventional challenging PvE content design.

Conventional PvE content seems to be primarily centered around mechanics. Challenging fights will use mechanics that ruthlessly punish failure. However, learning those mechanics and responding perfectly to them can be reasonably accomplished. When one does so, there is relatively little risk of dying (until the mechanics change). What separates skilled players from less skilled players is the amount of dps uptime they can maintain while still responding to the mechanics. Frankly, I find this time of gameplay rather boring (but not necessarily easy!).

Conversely, in this boss fight, it was relatively difficult to respond perfectly to the mechanics. There was so much demanded of the player that avoiding all of the CCs and heavy hits is impractical. The requirement for success here is being able to avoid a sufficient percentage of the attacks that you can still sustain yourself. This fight felt more to me like WvW or team fights in PvP. Coincidentally, I generally run around in PvE using a build optimized for WvW (e.g. I equip multiple stun breaks and weapons with blocking skills). This may have also made the fight more survivable for me, and thus more enjoyable.

If others are having trouble with all of the CCs in this fight, I may recommend swapping some utilities or weapons for more stun breaks and blocks.

was i the only one who didn’t seem to have a problem with that fight? i was running a full zerk DH, yeah i went down a few times but never actually died.
and i was not using stand your ground.

Thank you, Anet. I know several disabled GW2 players who will be able to complete this tonight. Previously it would have been near impossible for them.

I agree, thanks for the changes.

I was able to do it pre-nerf, but only by partnering up. I don’t mind doing that from time to time, even enjoy it, but it was a jarring break from the usual playstyle of the personal story content, which is supposed to be content a player can complete on their own and at their own pace. If I want to group I’ll do a group activity. So yes, thank you!

Sneaky suggestion

Re-add the old difficulty level as a Challenge Mote.

To me, the fight wasn’t difficult, it was simply frustrating. I didn’t die but didn’t enjoy it at all. I haven’t tried it after the changes yet but thank you for listening!

Thanks for the change. I muddled through on my Warrior, but some of my alts were waiting to see if there was a nerf incoming,

Hopefully these things will be picked up prior to launch going forward, but great to see such a quick fix.

Big thanks for the change. For me the most annoying bit was the invuln jades in such a small space bouncing me around the room on a ranged mesmer.

I was going to give it a rest for a few days but the new changes mean I will try it again later- hopefully this time I won’t d/c at the ’let’s talk endlessly after you won the fight’ stage, and I’ll be taking my short range weapon sets. That and lack of stability and lack of available condi cleanse.

It’s probably still going to be annoying as sustain on my mesmer is always an issue in longer fights. I think then I’ll run through it on necro and ele and come back here and tell you how easy it was as they will have no issues with the fight at all.

This fight needs to be be detuned more. It’s absolutely awful. A small room full of explosions and that jade construct while having to throw crap at the boss? Who thought this would be enteraining?

GreyWolf.8670:

This fight needs to be be detuned more. It’s absolutely awful. A small room full of explosions and that jade construct while having to throw crap at the boss? Who thought this would be enteraining?

I thought the Jade was removed with the patch?

Randulf.7614:

GreyWolf.8670:

This fight needs to be be detuned more. It’s absolutely awful. A small room full of explosions and that jade construct while having to throw crap at the boss? Who thought this would be enteraining?

I thought the Jade was removed with the patch?

A jade armor spawns later in the fight if you don’t kill Caedecus quickly enough, but its much easier to deal with than the jade bow is

Randulf.7614:

GreyWolf.8670:

This fight needs to be be detuned more. It’s absolutely awful. A small room full of explosions and that jade construct while having to throw crap at the boss? Who thought this would be enteraining?

I thought the Jade was removed with the patch?

I thought so too. But he still appeared once in the final fight. The final fight is not so hard, just have to focus a bit, but once jade bow popped up, it proved to be somewhat of a challenge to stay alive. But got through it without getting downed. Going in with dagger/focus on ele helped tremendously though.

When i did it wednesday on my mesmer, i felt i got kitten slapped around the room.

I got through on Mesmer, using a HoT chronophantasma condi build. It was doable, just pretty unpleasant to be constantly slammed around the room. I died several times.

I think ANET was wise to ease up on that a bit.

Gaile Gray.6029:

As the OP noted (and thank you so much for updating your post!), changes were made to the boss encounter. Please read the update notes for more information.

Sorry Gaile. It is still a horrible fight of attrition. And the more I think about why the fight was designed to be like that the more I am convinced the encounter designer deliberately designed this fight to not be fun.

There is absolutely NOTHING well designed in this fight. Whoever designed that boss fight should NEVER work on boss fights again in my opinion. It was that bad.

Dying, respawning and right after reentering the room being at under 1000 health or just flat out dying again is pure attrition. I died several times in a row without being able to do anything because there was too much going on and I couldn’t see what is going on all around me.

This fight is still ridiculous. If you can make it without dying – great for you, but I’m a filthy casual and just had to fight the final boss naked from all the wipes thouse jade constructs cost me (still no anvil in the entire instance, great). Nothing fun about this fight, honestly – previous boss fights in LW S3 were difficult, but mostly in a good way. This is just BS, a story instance I will never touch again, not event for a milion AP.

Ajun.3102:

This fight is still ridiculous. If you can make it without dying – great for you, but I’m a filthy casual and just had to fight the final boss naked from all the wipes thouse jade constructs cost me (still no anvil in the entire instance, great). Nothing fun about this fight, honestly – previous boss fights in LW S3 were difficult, but mostly in a good way. This is just BS, a story instance I will never touch again, not event for a milion AP.

There’s only one jade.

this fight is so much easier than people make it seem.
Run one stunbreak and use bloodstone shards. Point your camera down. if you have fingers, gg.

Ok, I have to apologize – was a bit too mad after my first attempt, because I got into a never-ending wipe cycle and was left with no gear. Today I finished the fight within a reasonable time, wiping only once, due to my own fault. I overreacted in the previous post and I’m sorry. Fight wasn’t the best designed, but it was ok – Canach’s jokes made up for everything

I think I already said it before, but if you find this boss fight frustrating, consider bringing a second person in with you and fight them together. It’ll certainly significantly reduce the agony level for both of you.

Ajun.3102:

This fight is still ridiculous. If you can make it without dying – great for you, but I’m a filthy casual and just had to fight the final boss naked from all the wipes thouse jade constructs cost me (still no anvil in the entire instance, great). Nothing fun about this fight, honestly – previous boss fights in LW S3 were difficult, but mostly in a good way. This is just BS, a story instance I will never touch again, not event for a milion AP.

I know you posted another post already, but ^this is exactly how I felt after the fight and still feel about it. “I will never touch [this instance] again, not event for a million AP”.

I mean, if something is wrecking you with every blow, mass AoE and perma-CC, it should at least not have a gazillion HP and be invulnerable 70% of the time. At least this fight was so tedious that I greatly doubt it could be any worse and started reading up on raid bosses it simply can’t be worse than that fight.

Raids are easier than the pre-nerf fight because you have other players to distribute aggro. It was actually fairly easy with two players because the aggro from the boss and adds was halved and our damage was doubled.