Guild Wars 2

Stupid hiding behind stupid mechanics.
I want a direct 1vsX fight, no runing around to do mechanics. Your chance, A-Net, and you wasted it. Now I will only play this kittenty story until I got into the new map and unlocked the new reward track. Never ever again.

care to elaborate? I’ve been seeing people complain about mechanics being too complicated….. they’re simple thought puzzles. Kedria even goats you if you about it if take more then a minute.

Here’s a suggestion: for the next LS (if it follows the format of this one, which I sincerely hop it does not) make a second version of every instanced fight in which all the “mechanics” are absent and players have to complete the instance using only the regular abilities of the class they are playing. That shouldn’t be too resource-intensive – it’s just the same map with all the tricks and puzzles switched off and, if necessary, the enemies toughened up a bit.

Then check your metrics on how many players choose to play through the puzzle/gimmick maps and how many opt for the straight fights. Open forum threads for feedback on each and do some polling.

Find out how many players actually enjoy or prefer this stuff and how many just want to play the classes they chose the way those classes were designed to be played. Then use that information to inform future design choices.

At the moment it very much seems as though the instances are designed to entertain the designers not the audience but maybe that’s just me and most players really love having to learn new abilities every episode and then never use them again. Would be nice to find out once and for all.

Tiny Doom.4380:

Here’s a suggestion: for the next LS (if it follows the format of this one, which I sincerely hop it does not) make a second version of every instanced fight in which all the “mechanics” are absent and players have to complete the instance using only the regular abilities of the class they are playing. That shouldn’t be too resource-intensive – it’s just the same map with all the tricks and puzzles switched off and, if necessary, the enemies toughened up a bit.

Then check your metrics on how many players choose to play through the puzzle/gimmick maps and how many opt for the straight fights. Open forum threads for feedback on each and do some polling.

Find out how many players actually enjoy or prefer this stuff and how many just want to play the classes they chose the way those classes were designed to be played. Then use that information to inform future design choices.

At the moment it very much seems as though the instances are designed to entertain the designers not the audience but maybe that’s just me and most players really love having to learn new abilities every episode and then never use them again. Would be nice to find out once and for all.

I completely agree with the last paragraph. I haven’t enjoyed season 3 and frankly I consider it a complete failiure in story telling. Tedious, puzzles, bad instances that are OP. Characters I’d rather kill than have in my guild or party. I feel like I am watching “Lost the tv show” reveal a 100 questions during the season and answer 5 of them in said season finale.

I am sick of this ever increasing 100x duration grind mentality Anet is determined to push this game into. And I am tired of gimmick after gimmick coming out in mini games and puzzles. This content should be optional not forced. If I wanted to play a Puzzle game or Extreme Mario. I’d play those not an MMorpg. What is the point of classes, builds, gearing if we are going to spend all our lives each episode and map learning a new gimmick skill that overides the core class and weapon skills?

Tiny Doom.4380:

At the moment it very much seems as though the instances are designed to entertain the designers not the audience but maybe that’s just me and most players really love having to learn new abilities every episode and then never use them again. Would be nice to find out once and for all.

Haven’t gotten to the Ep6 stuff yet (waiting for the bugs to get squashed and balance passes to happen), but after Jade Anything, Caudacus, Chalice of Tears, etc, your statement rings so true.

Even way back at launch, I noticed a number of times where the game required me to do gimmicks and tricks instead of playing the character I have. I didn’t like it then, and I don’t care for it now.

Yeah. I’ve been using a teleport-to-a-friend to get to the new maps and wait till the guides come out to do the story since for me, figuring out all those little tricks is more aggravating than fun.

What are you even talking about? I finished everything on the first try without struggling on anything, I legit have no idea how you struggled with “puzzles”. Do you mean you couldn’t figure out how to avoid AoE? If that’s the case, it’s sort of … pathetic to ask for a change.

I finished the story, map completion and the jumping puzzle without having to look at a guide. They were so incredibly simple.

Have not tried the jumping puzzle yet, but I have done the story and map completion and I have got to say it was pretty good. I especially like how they toned down the hearts so they are much quicker to complete compared to LD and EB.

Even the final fight wasn’t that bad, it was just a ton of AoE spam. I wouldn’t mind seeing that toned down, especially his attack where it shoots out several waves of moving AoEs from him. When I was in melee range, if I didn’t see that attack coming it was an instant down every time because I would be hit by 6-10 of those attacks simultaneously, which I think is ridiculous. So maybe either reduce the number of AoEs in each wave of that attack, or add a small ICD so that you can only be hit by 1 of them every 1/4 second, to avoid instant downs like that by being hit with all of them at once.

The glyph/shield mechanic can be a bit annoying, but the only thing that actually bothered me in this episode is the Manifestation of Self-doubt. The confront mechanic is just a totally random toss-in that doesn’t have much hinting at what to do. The NPC line hint is easily missed because the whole fight is about “confronting your doubt” anyway, and the other required that you target an “ally” during combat.

As someone that plays with action camera most of the time, targeting allies in the middle of a fight is not something that usually happens. Especially not in a fight where you already have to figure out 4 new effects placed on yourself and the enemy. All of which have somewhat lengthy tooltips. If the ghosts were at least considered as invul enemies, they would be more easily targeted by chance or cycling through targets with default key bindings, so you could see their text descriptions as a further hint.

mrstealth.6701:

As someone that plays with action camera most of the time, targeting allies in the middle of a fight is not something that usually happens.

They aren’t targetable no matter what mode you’re in. You just need to figure it out and hit F.

Drop the kittening puzzles. I suck at it. I wanted to play Ep6 a lot. Now, I don’t even want to launch it ever again, because the very first gate is a kittening puzzles, something I can’t pass, no matter how hard I try. Spending 45 minutes on this kitten is not fun. Spending 45 minutes trying to understand a logic which is incredibly different from mine is not fun.

There isn’t any enigma, here, just absolute boredom and joy killer. Please; drop that kitten ANet. i won’t buy an expansion full of this kind of horrors.

Edit : Seriously, have the NPC tell us what to do ! Do we need to snuff out all the lights (did once, nothing happened), make three in a row glow (what I saw on a guide), anything else ?

Fluffball.8307:

mrstealth.6701:

As someone that plays with action camera most of the time, targeting allies in the middle of a fight is not something that usually happens.

They aren’t targetable no matter what mode you’re in. You just need to figure it out and hit F.

They can be targeted, and their description includes “Confront to gain Minor Breakthrough”. I think they are only untargetable briefly (maybe a second or two), when they first appear.

I wasn’t a fan of the laser puzzles, but the Self Doubt fight was quite entertaining on a staff tempest with everything but AA water at or slightly below 140 secs CD.

I’ll be very honest and come right out and say it took me a lot longer than it should have to figure out both the solution to the Bloodstone puzzles and the mechanic to the fight with your personal guilt.

However here is the thing…that was me, myself and I being dumb. I mean that was me just not using my head and being a kitten . I acknowledge that, I was being an idiot. These puzzles…are not complicated. They are relatively simple and I think they added to the story because they gave a bit of a challenge to progress through the story. It was welcome. I’m not about to go off on same angry rant about how “terrible” they were or that they were “pointless” or “frustrating”.

It is not Anets fault if the people taking issue with these relatively simple puzzles…are too dumb to quickly solve them and then too equally dumb to recognize their own stupidity and then just laugh it off like “Oh man, how was I messing that up? kitten . Moving on.” I mean…really? Your pride must have really taken a drastic hit.

It’s not a question of the puzzles being difficult to figure out. Of course they aren’t difficult. Even with the poor presentation of in-game information (mouse-over is not a great choice at the best of times, let alone in combat) these are all very straightforward, even simple puzzles.

The issue is with the replacement of Class and Weapon skills with one-off or temporary skills. It’s with playing the character as you, the player, conceived, and built it.

When the new skills become something that’s permanently added to the character, like the additional Downed skill, for example, that’s another matter. That adds depth and options to the character and the class. Temporary skills that are never seen or used outside of the specific instance do the opposite.

Tiny Doom.4380:

It’s not a question of the puzzles being difficult to figure out. Of course they aren’t difficult. Even with the poor presentation of in-game information (mouse-over is not a great choice at the best of times, let alone in combat) these are all very straightforward, even simple puzzles.

The issue is with the replacement of Class and Weapon skills with one-off or temporary skills. It’s with playing the character as you, the player, conceived, and built it.

When the new skills become something that’s permanently added to the character, like the additional Downed skill, for example, that’s another matter. That adds depth and options to the character and the class. Temporary skills that are never seen or used outside of the specific instance do the opposite.

But that isn’t the issue with this particular update—no class and weapon skills are replaced in the self-doubt fight, and you don’t lose your skills while doing any real fighting in the little puzzle where you throw the bloodstone shards…and “pick up an object to throw, then return to your regular skills” is totally vanilla GW2.

The bloodstone puzzle was patently obvious how to solve, and the self-doubt thing had a lot of clues. Short of an in-game message saying “GO TO EIR AND PRESS F NOW,” they did everything they needed to do to communicate what needed to be communicated.

And if a player doesn’t want to press F or can’t figure it out, they can run back out of combat and change their build so it’s suited to the debuff/buff situation, which they then have time to read and think about and design a play style that can still defeat the manifestation of self-doubt (which is what I did for the “Fearless” achievement, so I know it’s possible). And that’s just buildcraft. For a very unique situation, yes, but still just buildcraft.

As far as the general situation—that many of these LS fights have given a skill that comes up above the profession-specific skills—for the most part, if you just punch the thing when you get it and then return to normal play, you do all right. It still doesn’t require you to learn how to play anything differently, just be observant.

Honestly, years ago it was all “more mechanics, more mechanics! we hate bosses that just take a million years to fight down” on these boards. Now it’s all “less mechanics, less mechanics! we just want to fight!” IDK, maybe the devs have gone too far the other direction in listening to advice on these boards, but mostly I’m less bored in these instanced fights than I used to be. (That doesn’t make them all balanced perfectly to my tastes, which is another issue.)

Bridget Morrigan.1752:

Honestly, years ago it was all “more mechanics, more mechanics! we hate bosses that just take a million years to fight down” on these boards. Now it’s all “less mechanics, less mechanics! we just want to fight!” IDK, maybe the devs have gone too far the other direction in listening to advice on these boards, but mostly I’m less bored in these instanced fights than I used to be. (That doesn’t make them all balanced perfectly to my tastes, which is another issue.)

Yeah, I’m a little disheartened to see a lot of “no puzzle” sentiment, considering that managing special mechanics is Pre-Raid 101 anyway. My bigger objection, as is incredibly common with GW2’s design for the past.. years?..is that there is an ill-considered facet or poorly balanced item that makes their otherwise clever designs into something utterly obnoxious.

In the first mission, the puzzle didn’t follow the previous conveyance. To free the very-slappable NPC, you make all the lines go out. To attack the boss at the end, you have to light them all up so she overloads. That wasn’t what was demonstrated, and it looks like it was done for the devs whim and humor than player consistency.

In the second mission, the debuff claw isn’t dodgable. Or, if it is, its execution was so sloppy that the visual effect and actual projectile are nowhere near each other. That makes getting Fearless impossible on so many different builds, with no warning that such a mechanic is coming to allow the player to adjust.
It could have been a good fight, but it just came out to be incredibly annoying and wrong.

Rauderi.8706:

In the first mission, the puzzle didn’t follow the previous conveyance. To free the very-slappable NPC, you make all the lines go out. To attack the boss at the end, you have to light them all up so she overloads. That wasn’t what was demonstrated, and it looks like it was done for the devs whim and humor than player consistency.

I actually did it the opposite way. To free the Exemplar, I lit all of the lines and to damage the boss I turned them all off. Leads me to believe you can do either one either way.

Rauderi.8706:

In the second mission, the debuff claw isn’t dodgable. Or, if it is, its execution was so sloppy that the visual effect and actual projectile are nowhere near each other. That makes getting Fearless impossible on so many different builds, with no warning that such a mechanic is coming to allow the player to adjust.
It could have been a good fight, but it just came out to be incredibly annoying and wrong.

According to Dulfy, the claw is dodgeable, but I agree the visual cues are off. Perhaps a bug. But dodging the claw is how they recommend getting the Fearless achievement. Also, if you die you have ample opportunity to change your build.

I didn’t mind the Doubt fight that much once I figured it out.

@OP
Personally, I like the puzzles a lot more than just whittling boss health down. Pressing 1 and watching a health bar go down while occasionally dodging attacks is extremely boring. If the boss works the same as any other mob, just with a lot more health, what’s the point of even having a boss fight?
Heart of Thorns set a precedent that not everything was going to be core Tyria faceroll anymore.
This way there is some satisfaction to be had in figuring out the fight or puzzle.

When I did the self doubt fight I didn’t realize you could interact with Eir & co, and I determined the claws to be undodgeable.

I just facetanked the self doubt and killed the boss anyways, took a lot of kiting tho.

rip mechanics?

I like the fact that, besides fighting, I also have to think. Fighting the Doubt is easy when you figure it out. Just if you listen to what npc says: “Seek closure on the doubts and insecurities that plague you.” ( -> go close to these ghosts representing your doubt) I don’t know what’s the problem, it’s pretty simple.
I haven’t done the achievement yet, so I can’t say anything about that. But I’m sure there’s a way to do it as well.

If your reason for hating PVE is that you have to do a bit more than press skills off cooldown, I have a suggestion: Dont play PVE.

The puzzles were relatively simple, and even if you had a hard time with it, the solutions were posted after a few hours on Dulfy and in these forums.

Seeing how you came all this way to kitten about it, you could’ve just read it or waited for someone smarter than you to figure it out and posted a solution for your lazy kitten

Devs please dont listen to these mutts, they dont want to play the game, they just want to complete it in the simplest way possible.

Raven.4132:

Also, if you die you have ample opportunity to change your build.

Taking damage was not my problem. Even at 25 stacks, shadow Warrior can’t hit for beans over my Signet. :P
Death was not an option.

Personally, I like the puzzles a lot more than just whittling boss health down. Pressing 1 and watching a health bar go down while occasionally dodging attacks is extremely boring. If the boss works the same as any other mob, just with a lot more health, what’s the point of even having a boss fight?
Heart of Thorns set a precedent that not everything was going to be core Tyria faceroll anymore.
This way there is some satisfaction to be had in figuring out the fight or puzzle.

It wasn’t even that hard a fight. In theory. I appreciated the mechanics and understood them as soon as the tooltips showed up.
But I didn’t have any blocks or ways to reflect, no access to Aegis, etc. And again, I couldn’t die to reset. I could’ve walked away from the computer for the span of my 140 sec cooldowns, and it still wouldn’t have helped.

So, if I step back and don’t think about the achievement, I’m actually pretty mellow about the Doubt fight. The fact that I got screwed over by sloppy execution (and if I go for it, will have to sit through so much story again…) is what gets me mad.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Yeah. I’ve been using a teleport-to-a-friend to get to the new maps and wait till the guides come out to do the story since for me, figuring out all those little tricks is more aggravating than fun.

why do you even play the game if its all not fun to you
That 1 puzzle is just a tiny part of the instances and you arent under pressure while solving it…. you dont even have to understand it you can most likely solve it just by trying

And why do you do the achievements if you dont actually do them but just use 100% guides so you dont actually achieve anything yourself…

I understand if some people use dulfy for tedious achievements if they tried and cant do it themselves or cant find the last hidden items
But people who dont even bother at all to achieve anything and just instantly go to dulfy
I dont even understand what they play the game for anymore

No fun if there is no challenge

From what I understand from OP’s request is that he wants a shooting range instead of an epic fight. A statue that stands still and doesnt try to defend itself?

well, some of us are not good at fighting and good at puzzles.
some are good at fighting and bad at puzzles
some are good at fighting and good at puzzles
some are bad at fighting and bad at pulles.

I am…. mediocre. The puzzles weren’t hard. The fights were decent. I liked that. I liked that I don’t need to become a dps monster or have to resolve to guides.

Tiny Doom.4380:

It’s not a question of the puzzles being difficult to figure out. Of course they aren’t difficult. Even with the poor presentation of in-game information (mouse-over is not a great choice at the best of times, let alone in combat) these are all very straightforward, even simple puzzles.

The issue is with the replacement of Class and Weapon skills with one-off or temporary skills. It’s with playing the character as you, the player, conceived, and built it.

When the new skills become something that’s permanently added to the character, like the additional Downed skill, for example, that’s another matter. That adds depth and options to the character and the class. Temporary skills that are never seen or used outside of the specific instance do the opposite.

…This is literally such a non issue I really don’t get how this turns into a “problem” for you. The skills you gained when you picked up the bloodstone shard were temporary, it wasn’t a complete replacement and it was a specific in the moment circumstance that was resolved by solving the puzzle. The fight with your guild only required that you go up to the aspect of Eir, Rytlock, Caithe, etc hit F and then use X to execute the special skill to assist you in the fight.

There is no issue at all with them replacing class and weapon skills -in those specific moments- to solve a relatively simple puzzle. Now it just seems like you’re trying to find some sort of irrational justification for the dislike when all that really happened is that you, and others, got frustrated…their pride got hurt when they finally figured out how simple the puzzle was and now its all back track back track find another excuse to complain about it.

Orangensaft.7139:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Yeah. I’ve been using a teleport-to-a-friend to get to the new maps and wait till the guides come out to do the story since for me, figuring out all those little tricks is more aggravating than fun.

why do you even play the game if its all not fun to you
That 1 puzzle is just a tiny part of the instances and you arent under pressure while solving it…. you dont even have to understand it you can most likely solve it just by trying

And why do you do the achievements if you dont actually do them but just use 100% guides so you dont actually achieve anything yourself…

I understand if some people use dulfy for tedious achievements if they tried and cant do it themselves or cant find the last hidden items
But people who dont even bother at all to achieve anything and just instantly go to dulfy
I dont even understand what they play the game for anymore

No fun if there is no challenge

why do you even play the game if its all not fun to you

Are you actually saying everyone has to enjoy everything or else not play the game?

And why do you do the achievements if you dont actually do them but just use 100% guides so you dont actually achieve anything yourself…

Who said I was using the guide to get the achievements? Perhaps you could read what I actually wrote. “wait till the guides come out to do the story” I’m using the guide to get past all the special tricks in order to see the storyline as the special tricks to progress the storyline aren’t interesting to me.

I understand if some people use dulfy for tedious achievements if they tried and cant do it themselves or cant find the last hidden items
But people who dont even bother at all to achieve anything and just instantly go to dulfy
I dont even understand what they play the game for anymore

(More words where you showed that you didn’t read what was said but instead commented on what you imagined was said)

Really, some people….
If the tricks and puzzles are fun for you, then great. But they’re not going to be fun for everyone. If someone wants to bypass a boring part of the story instances by using a guide it’s no skin off your nose. It’s entertainment not a job, and boring parts of entertainment can be bypassed.