Guild Wars 2

This is simply a general complaint and I would love to hear if anyone is having as much trouble. I cannot actually play through the story line of the game because I die in about 3 seconds after pulling.

I have a 27 thief, currently stuck at the level 14 quest. I’ve never seen a class with less mitigation in my life. Not only that, it’s somehow fair to the designers of these quests to make each pull about 6 enemies. Not everyone rolled a warrior and thieves were given next to nothing to prevent damage to themselves. Avoidance means nothing if you can’t do any damage while rolling around on the floor since you can’t actually group for the story quests.

So I would like anyone, particularly a mod/dev who had a hand in developing these story lines, to explain how I might be able to actually play through this part of the game I really looked forward to.

I understand wanting to try something different and truly love this game but a little mercy would be nice when all I want to do is play with my friends and see the story line unfold without smashing my head against a wall. It’s not a challenge, it’s practically impossible unless I completely respec my dps oriented character to tanking just so I can do this one quest. That should not be necessary.

I too, as a Guardian, have had lots of trouble w/ the story quests. I was stuck at the level 11/12 quest till I hit lvl 24. I must have tried and failed that quest a dozen times. Eventually I pulled it off.

I did the next few story quests w/ a friend. Those went really well. I haven’t progressed the story for a while….

Not sure if you’re supposed to out level them and return, or do it w/ a friend, but there is no doubt they are difficult. It certainly isn’t just you.

Grab a friend, also what race/options are you?
I have seen a few of these posts and sure i found some of them difficult but as a human thief/missing parents i was able to complete each one solo (albeit some took more then 1 try)
Also maybe using DW daggers would help, Death Blossom counts as both an attack and an evade.

Can you tell us your playstyle, what skills you’re using, weapons, etc.? Telling us how you play as a thief will help a lot more than just saying you’re having trouble.

just to clarify.
you said that you cant group for story quest.
i was stuck on a quest where the enemy used a magic horn to summons a gang of ice imps...i got 2 friends to enter instance with me and we won… if all else fails,try to get some one to go in with you.
good luck.

I use bleeds.. lots and lots of bleeds. If you go double daggers then the 3 ability is death blossum. I can’t imagine playing my thief without the ability. You can bleed all 6 mobs at once then throw down some caltrops and they are slowed. This gives you plenty of time to run away and heal/stealth and get some initiative back for another round of bleeds. By running in and bleeding everything then just running away you can kill most mobs without them doing anything to you.

I AoE farm on my thief all the time and it’s a blast. I hope this helps you.

Warriors actually have very little mitigation advantage over thieves. Heavy armor typically has 7% more defense than medium armor, and innate toughness of either class is the same.

Warriors, like thieves, depend on active mitigation for survivability. Neither can just take hits to the face and expect to survive.

First and foremost, if you’re playing either as ranged, you will want to be kiting a lot; if you’re playing as melee, you will want to circle strafe a lot. Both allow you to avoid effects with a wind-up time, kiting will also allow you to avoid instant melee attacks.

Second, dodging, either to evade telegraphed attacks, or to gain some distance is useful and should be used frequently.

Third, abilities matter. Especially those that aid your survivability. Blindness effects negate hits, knockdown effects (tripwire) stop mobs from doing anything.

Finally, if you still have problems, you may consider speccing into traits that aid your survivability. Shadow Arts gives you toughness, healing power, and some nice survivability traits.

My story quests keep out leveling me. :P

I just blow through them but I’m a Mesmer. I can normally do a story quest once I’m at least one level under its recommended level of play.

Heres what you do, just keep spawning at entrance when you die and keep running into the action firing away eventually you will wear down what ever it is you trying to kill, youll just be naked with a repair bill when its over.

Are you a Norn by any chance?

There were a couple of bugged quests in the Level 14 range for Norns where your allies die much too quickly, or the NPC’s are dealing far too high DPS. Don’t beat yourself up over this.

To get around this, you can invite other players into your personal story, or they can invite you. Just ask around in /map chat, or look for players who seem to be heading into that instance and ask to join. Once you’ve completed a personal story instance in a group, each player who needs to complete it will be given an option to mark the quest as done for themselves, so you only need to run it once.

Don’t be afraid to go old school and ask around for help with this instance. Because they are bugged, lots of people are needing to do them.

I have also found the Personal Story Quests to be a real challenge.
I spent two days LFG to simply try to progress this interesting story,
I don’t think I have left one instance with my clothes remaining on my
body and they are just sooo frustrating. They have become ‘almost’ a
game ruining experience as I now no longer care what is happening in
the world of GW2 as I really cant face another horrible gaming experience
that offers no personal reward except frustration and disapointment.

I would have thought that of all the elements of the game, the personal
story would have been the most enjoyable as it should be able to be
completed solo (after all, t is MY story), without losing all your hard earned
silver paying for
repairs and of course, its main purpose (or so I would have thought) allowing
the player to follow the through line story of world events. However, I now
really have no idea what is happening and what the story is about.

I do like a challenge and I do like to have to work at something in order to
feel that satisfying sense of acheivement, however It would be nice to at
least stand a bit of a chance against mobs without fighting naked all the time.

Mojano.4876:

I have also found the Personal Story Quests to be a real challenge.
I spent two days LFG to simply try to progress this interesting story,
I don’t think I have left one instance with my clothes remaining on my
body and they are just sooo frustrating. They have become ‘almost’ a
game ruining experience as I now no longer care what is happening in
the world of GW2 as I really cant face another horrible gaming experience
that offers no personal reward except frustration and disapointment.

I would have thought that of all the elements of the game, the personal
story would have been the most enjoyable as it should be able to be
completed solo (after all, t is MY story), without losing all your hard earned
silver paying for
repairs and of course, its main purpose (or so I would have thought) allowing
the player to follow the through line story of world events. However, I now
really have no idea what is happening and what the story is about.

I do like a challenge and I do like to have to work at something in order to
feel that satisfying sense of acheivement, however It would be nice to at
least stand a bit of a chance against mobs without fighting naked all the time.

I don’t think personal story quests are intended to be quite this difficult, and it’s likely the quest is actually just bugged at the moment. You should fill out a bug report on it, and then just take a break for a bit, if you can’t find 1 or 2 people to help complete it.

It will likely be fixed in the near future, and you can come back to it then, and since you get downleveled, it should still be fun later on.

I’ve done my main story quests up to 3 levels under as warrior. I would get two shot but I managed to strafe, use my CC’s, assist my NPC allies and managed to progress through my storyline. Skill has a lot to with how well you progress in this game and with how much gear. If your skill level of play is lower then normal, you’ll need to depend heavily on gear, if your skill level is much higher then normal, you can suffice with sub-par gear or even less.

Your understanding of the game also plays an important role on how far you will go as well.

Weapons For Example: 2h mace for warriors tend to dish out slow high-dmg burst atks and has interupts vs. a 2h sword which is high-steady dps with no interrupts. Based on situations, a 2h mace may play better since it can interrupt but sometimes, you just need to dish the damage constantly and quickly, a 2h sword would fit that role. There are quite a few combinations of weapons and scenarios when some are better then others. You have to decide.

Skills For Example: Some fights, mobs don’t hit hard, its what they do that hurts. For, example, mobs that bleed. They swarm you and stack it on you. It would be good if you put skills that remove conditions on your bar vs. having skills that do dmg. Removing the debuff is sort of in a sense equivalent to that of heal.

Players do stand a chance, if they know what they are doing. This game has complexity to it.

I did my the quests up to level 18. My warrior was level 13 when I completed that. I failed at the level 19 quest, so I’m levelling up a bit now.
They are completely easy, and if you die you just retry, picking off enemies one by one and still making it in the end.

Spartyr.6795:

Are you a Norn by any chance?

There were a couple of bugged quests in the Level 14 range for Norns where your allies die much too quickly, or the NPC’s are dealing far too high DPS. Don’t beat yourself up over this.

To get around this, you can invite other players into your personal story, or they can invite you. Just ask around in /map chat, or look for players who seem to be heading into that instance and ask to join. Once you’ve completed a personal story instance in a group, each player who needs to complete it will be given an option to mark the quest as done for themselves, so you only need to run it once.

Don’t be afraid to go old school and ask around for help with this instance. Because they are bugged, lots of people are needing to do them.

Heh. This is the quest I was stuck on… so it’s bugged? That explains a lot. those npc “hellpers” dropped like flies.

vidiotking.1928:

Spartyr.6795:

Are you a Norn by any chance?

There were a couple of bugged quests in the Level 14 range for Norns where your allies die much too quickly, or the NPC’s are dealing far too high DPS. Don’t beat yourself up over this.

To get around this, you can invite other players into your personal story, or they can invite you. Just ask around in /map chat, or look for players who seem to be heading into that instance and ask to join. Once you’ve completed a personal story instance in a group, each player who needs to complete it will be given an option to mark the quest as done for themselves, so you only need to run it once.

Don’t be afraid to go old school and ask around for help with this instance. Because they are bugged, lots of people are needing to do them.

Heh. This is the quest I was stuck on… so it’s bugged? That explains a lot. those npc “hellpers” dropped like flies.

Yeah, there are two back to back. I know one is called, “Rumors of trouble” and the other is, “Minotaur Rampant” I believe.

Once you’ve completed those two, the next missions get much easier.

I vote to bring a party-mate or two. The missions never take too long and are fairly interesting if you’re not on the same story.

What guildmates are for.

vidiotking.1928:

Spartyr.6795:

Are you a Norn by any chance?

There were a couple of bugged quests in the Level 14 range for Norns where your allies die much too quickly, or the NPC’s are dealing far too high DPS. Don’t beat yourself up over this.

To get around this, you can invite other players into your personal story, or they can invite you. Just ask around in /map chat, or look for players who seem to be heading into that instance and ask to join. Once you’ve completed a personal story instance in a group, each player who needs to complete it will be given an option to mark the quest as done for themselves, so you only need to run it once.

Don’t be afraid to go old school and ask around for help with this instance. Because they are bugged, lots of people are needing to do them.

Heh. This is the quest I was stuck on… so it’s bugged? That explains a lot. those npc “hellpers” dropped like flies.

I too also had issues with the norn quest, thought I was being a noob so kept trying over and over died so many times I broke all my armor and was trying it in the nude, did that 3 times before I almost said Eff this game lol. My friend told me he had the same issue and it made him angry as well, we have just skipped the story quests and look at the patch notes frequently awaiting a fix.

As a Charr doing the Ash Legion storyline, I’ve found the game extremely frustrating to nearly impossible at times. I gave up on enjoying the story missions around level 20, because the vast majority of them usually involved me and 2 or 3 NPCs vs large groups of 6 to 15 enemies at once. My allies always died, without fail, and this leaves me alone to try to contend with the remaining enemies.

“Retry from recent checkpoint” is essentially useless; this does not take you back to an early portion of the mission, prior to your NPCs getting you and themselves killed and alerting all the enemies on the map to spawn. This simply moves you to a checkpoint on the map with your allies still dead, and sometimes surrounded by now-spawned enemies.

What is silly is that generally the missions were lowering my level by 2 or 3. At first I wondered if the Mesmer was just that weak or if I was a horrible player, but I was having no issues at all in general PvE and still don’t. As I’ve reached around level 37 now I plan to go back and try these yet again with more skills, but in my personal opinion these quests are poorly designed at best.

There needs to be substantially different level scaling, and perhaps the option to order your NPC allies to stay somewhere, not attack, or otherwise give you some options with them. If we are meant to do these missions with a party of people, that is not made at all clear at any point during the game, and that should be addressed.

That was very well said, I felt exactly the same way

losttangent.8149:

This is simply a general complaint and I would love to hear if anyone is having as much trouble.

It’s not just you, friend. Two of my friends who joined this game with me also have this problem. I do too. I’d say about 1 in 3 quests I have to outwit the AI (retreat and heal etc.) or “die through” the span of it, which ends up costing a fortune in repairs. My elementalist is 57, and doing (55) A Light in the Darkness – I’m pretty much ready to dismiss all quests from now on.

The rewards are quaint, and the storyline is adequate but the difficulty could be a comedy if it weren’t so expensive. A lot of the time I comb around to see whether there are any major items I’m supposed to pick up and use. This has been the case twice, but each time the NPCs told me about it anyway.

The only confusing part to me is why they’re like this. It’s not like Karma waypoints or events are ever this hard – some being very difficult but doable. Quests stand head and shoulders above the rest of the PVE game in terms of difficulty, it’s just bizarre.

I don’t understand why its such a problem to re-spec before a storyline instance (or any situation for that matter). I think that is the key to a lot of them. If I fail a couple of times in one spec, I’ll try another.

It works a lot of times. Other times, I’ll just go back to playing and get a couple of levels until I can complete it. I like the fact that just because you show up, you don’t always get to win…it adds depth.

If none of that works…then I get some help from guildies,

Raf

With a lot of the story quests you need to use items, or avoid npcs as part of the quest. It might be you do not need to attack those mobs and can avoid them, or there might be an object you can use to split them up or weaken them.

Additionally there are a lot of boss / power mobs in the low level stories that have special abilities you need to learn to sport and avoid. Other these abilities can 1 or 2 shot you if you get hit.

For Thief I have found dagger / dagger or dagger / pistol, and even pistol / pistol pretty good. I like to use the smoke bomb utility with them for an AoE blind on packs of mobs. Remember that they don’t re-spawn so you can burst 1-2 down, and then use your heal to stealth or leap through smoke bomb to escape and reset them.

It would help to know which race / quest your on though.

i agree also, sick of the repair costs so stopped doing storyline.