I somehow feel like I should share my thoughts on the last few steps in the living story.
After coming from the superb molten alliance dungeon, I was looking forward to the story going to Southsun.
I was a regular Southsun visitor after the karka event. The karka’s themselves are so much fun to fight and provide a decent challenge. Bringing down that champion with 2 or 3 friends from my small guild was often the highlight of my day.
Despite the drops and it not being tied to an event. Karka’s are just fun to fight.
When the update came, so did the people. I’m liking what the developers did with Southsun overall, from aesthetics to events. It all looks great and it was pretty fun.
Even despite that mass of people just jumping from event to event instead of just exploring the place and letting the events come to them.
The lag could get frustrating and sometimes outright unplayable, but to be honest, that I can forgive due to the technical nature of the problem.
However, a shown during the flame & frost arc, spreading the events over multiple maps really helps with this problem.
The magic find and gold buff really didn’t do much in terms of incentive to stay in Southsun. I really dislike farming, of any kind. I simply do not have the desire to get rich in a game, I actually prefer being poor since that provides me with way more incentive to play. The boosts didn’t hurt, but I felt it was unnecessary.
Then yesterday happened.
Like many other threads are pointing out, the single player Canach and the multi player Null are simply not fun.
I play an engineer and dealing with environmental weapons with a multi kit build is suffering. Every time I want to cleanse a condition, get swiftness/other boons/other skills the mine detector dropped from my hands and I had to go find a new one.
Sure, that can be solved by just changing my utilities and it was easy enough to just simply not use utilities, but I hope you understand that isn’t much fun to deal with.
But simple enough, you beat Canach in a very anti-climactic way and he didn’t feel menacing or dangerous at all. In the story bit posted he felt genuinely threatening and smart. About mid way in the fight I felt like I was running around with a slab of meat and he was just chasing me around like a stray dog.
I didn’t mind the area being small and just an arena. I did get bothered by the mechanics of the fight. It just wasn’t really much of a fight.
When I saw the mines at the entrance I figured Canach would be this thief champion, shadowstepping all over the place and stealthing after attempting a backstab at you. ( Think of any decent thief in WvW )
Even with the mines in place and him exploding them all occasionally (leaving an obvious opening for you to attack him while he is triggering the mines).
As for the explorable mode, I went in there with my friends and after getting zapped down we basically all shrugged, decided it was sadly not fun enough to spend our limited game time on.
I just went in again, solo, to attempt to make sense of the mechanics and to be better able to form an opinion. When I got him down to 50%, I simply had enough. It just started to feel like a chore.
Golem based enemies can make for such great champions and interesting fight mechanics. I’m just sad to see that this isn’t one of them.
Despite all the negativity in this post, I’m really looking forward for the devs to no doubt set things straight again in the next step of the living story. Overall, I’m having a blast in Gw2 and that won’t change any time soon.
If anyone else wants to voice their opinion in this thread, by all means, go ahead.
But please, keep it constructive and play nice so this thread doesn’t get shut down.
Remember, “It sucks.” isn’t feedback.