Guild Wars 2

Those of you who played wow will remember the Oculus instance in WotLK (part of the Nexus area). In this instance, you assume the form of a dragon at the end and have to fight the boss dragon in dragon form. People would groan and frequently leave when the dungeon finder dropped them into it.

The instance was almost universally despised. I say almost because there was some small minority that liked it. For me, Canach solo is that instance . To be frank, it was a disappointment. I will pass on the advice Warcraft designers later admitted and with which I wholeheartedly agree. They basically said their mistake was to make players play something other than their character for long periods, and above all to do it in a boss fight.

The idea that you need to disarm his traps with a modified gun is fine, but you spend an entire boss fight running around disarming mines and trying to get him to trigger them. Half the time, he walks over them and nothing happens. I know there is a trick to it and it is doable, but that was the lesson WoW designers learnt. Player don’t usually enjoy this as a boss fight. A fight where they don’t ever get to use the skills they have honed.

It is doable, once you learn the nuances of the using the gun and what bugs up and when, but at the end you’re just like… “wow, I’m glad that mine disarm n’ lure stuff is over. Now I can go back to playing my character.”

I’m going to try the explorable now. I’m hoping it will be up to GW2’s normally great standard

Stormseed.2817:

I’m going to try the explorable now. I hoping it will be up to GW2’s normally great standard

Oh, well… xD

Stormseed.2817:

I’m going to try the explorable now. I hoping it will be up to GW2’s normally great standard

LoL… Nope.

It’s worse.

I never liked encounters that have you play a “mini-game” instead of using your characters skills. This goes for all MMOs, not just GW2. I guess it adds some variety, but to me it smacks of “video-game” mechanics, not MMO style game play.

It might sound odd, but I play MMOs because I generally don’t like “Video games”. People call me a gamer, which isn’t true. I am a long time MMO player. There is a difference

I agree. Putting new mechanics in the boss fights can work, but very rarely. In WoW instance I hated the mechanics, and I really preferred doing the instance alone. Same with this boss. Just wish I could do the exp. mode alone too.

Ps. It’s oculus instance, not nexus. :P

The least ran 5 man instance in WoW:
Trial of the Champion

Why?
Because the first part forced you to mount on a Horse and use special ‘Lance Abilities’ rather than your own class spells and abilities.

To this day, I shudder at the thought of running ToC 5 man.

I didn’t mind the Canach fight so much as the lack of storyline inside the instance. But I do agree, temporary, gimmicky, non-class/prof specific abilities are extremely annoying in a role-playing game.

I agree 100% that the Canach solo mission is horribly designed. I was actually looking forward to seeing the next step of the Living Story, but this encounter left an incredibly bad taste in my mouth. And I managed to succeed at the thing with probably less trouble than most.

First of all, there are so many karka trash mobs on absolutely ridiculous respawn rates on the way to the entrance that any solo player attempting to reach it will die. This is for a SOLO mission and they make it so you have to have a GROUP just to get to the entrance? Who thought that made any kind sense?

Then you are confronted by a bizarre mechanic where your abilities are doing no damage and so all the skills you have developed playing your characters are entirely useless fighting an annoying boss with irritating skills like knockdowns and charges.

I was very fortunate, I brought my mesmer onto the mission and it turns out Canach can be damaged by Confusion. I could spam abilities that gave that condition so I never once lead him over any mines, I never once had to jump through those ridiculous hoops the devs made for this encounter. The resulting Confusion-only damage fight was boring but at least I won. Which is far, far better than dying even once to that irritating encounter.

If I had brought any other character, I’m certain I would have failed the fight and after the trouble of just getting to that encounter that would left me with no more desire to play for a day and likely more. I haven’t experienced that feeling since the Karka Invasion finale, how fitting that once again Southsun Cove has provided yet another one of the low points of my experiences playing GW2.

I must concur. Between the random bugs with the mines and other nonsense, it’s my least favorite instant or dungeon so far. Eventually, yes, I did get all the achievement. But I never hope to see a repeat performance of this style of adventure again.

Agree with you 100%.

Really disappointed with the solo dungeon.

Well I just tried the solo dungeon several times and decided to heck with it and will never do it again. It saddens me to think that the designers thought that this was a good idea. Well it is not. In an otherwise enjoyable game this was a truelly horrible idea. I guess i’ll have to do the jumping puzzle and hope I finally beat it ( really bad at those ) in order to get the achievement. As a ranger Canach kept running past my pet and just spanked me to death. That gets very old very fast. Disarming the mines and or triggering them to harm him is a roll of the dice, with Canach having all the luck you none. Anet on this one you get an approval of ZERO for this.

Well, did you enjoy the explorable mode? LMAO!!!!

I wholeheartedly agree. Most boring instance ever. What is fun about going around and disarming mines? Nothing. When they first said there was going to be a solo instance, I was looking forward to testing my skill against a tough boss on my own. There’s a reason people learn how to solo bosses and champions, it’s fun to push your character and skill to the limit. I was hoping for a fun one on one fight, but no, all I get to do is run around in circles setting off mines. Personally I find it very boring, same with the explorable mode instance, very boring.

Well I just tried the solo explorable and as you all know… lolololo… it is the same instance with a tougher boss… I wasn’t upset. I just laughed.

I really like GW2. IMO, it is the most innovative triple-a mmo out there. So I’m going shrug this one off and go back to enjoying all the other stuff. I’m going just assume that every so often even the best designers put out a dud.

Btw, I did enjoy the overall corporation-gone-wild theme of this segment of the living story. And the dynamic events, etc were fun. It was a nice light poke at corporations.

Note: as someone pointed out, the wow instance was “The Oculus” not “Nexus”. My bad. Been a long time since I played wow.

I honestly think the dungeon in general is a good idea, and fairly decently made.
But I have absolutely no idea why they haven’t made some proper visual and audio cues when he is preparing to explode the mines and similar instead of only having it in the chat box, I thought we were supposed to play the game not the interface which this one feels like.

So to me it would be great if something as simple as the game messages sent to the chat box was instead shown on the middle of the screen.

This reminds me of every Real Time Strategy game. They all throw in a couple timed (hate timed) first person type things where there is no building up and no collecting resources. You do them ONLY because you need to get to the next chapter.

From listening to chat…NO ONE likes these and the soloists hate having to group to get anything out of it. The whole area is a little tough for anyone other than a hardcore guild where everyone has everything. BUT I like the concept of a living world, maybe the next one will be better.

I am absolutely amazed how much hate a five minute long mini mission that took very little effort to accomplish is getting. Are people seriously this against a tiny deviation from the norm?

I want to see more of this, both Canach AND Null. Having to use unique tactics entirely separate from how your character normally works for a short event is not actually a bad thing. If this was a full sized mission or dungeon, it could be problematic, but one fight? This was fun, and since you only have to do it once, what’s the problem?

Oculus took like 2 hours of flying around as a dragon.

This instance took 2 minutes and 30 seconds…

I don’t think there is really a comparison.

Null was better since you got to use your abilities and the mini-game. Though It was kind of short and easy. The Flame and Frost dungeon was better.

“I can’t press my attack button and make him die! This is a horribly designed encounter!”

Really, guys? Really?

Diva.4706:

I never liked encounters that have you play a “mini-game” instead of using your characters skills. This goes for all MMOs, not just GW2. I guess it adds some variety, but to me it smacks of “video-game” mechanics, not MMO style game play.

It might sound odd, but I play MMOs because I generally don’t like “Video games”. People call me a gamer, which isn’t true. I am a long time MMO player. There is a difference

I agree so much! I hate having to switch out my own skills for gimmicks. It’s even worse in GW2 when it’s required to defeat Canach.

Kal Spiro.9745:

I am absolutely amazed how much hate a five minute long mini mission that took very little effort to accomplish is getting. Are people seriously this against a tiny deviation from the norm?

I want to see more of this, both Canach AND Null. Having to use unique tactics entirely separate from how your character normally works for a short event is not actually a bad thing. If this was a full sized mission or dungeon, it could be problematic, but one fight? This was fun, and since you only have to do it once, what’s the problem?

It’s not so much being against it, but the idea that we got a "" five minute long mini mission", instead of some better permanent content.

I guess I’m one of the few people that actually love oculus and ToC 5man… Why are so many people afraid of change? Jesus Christ….

My problem: “Disarm”

You’re told explicitly that the device “disarms” the mines, and using the wrong frequency causes them to blow up. So i try to knock Canach back into a still armed mines and try to blow up the mines by using the wrong frequency when Canach is in blast range but I’m just outside it. Hard enough to do — frustrating when I see him taking no damage.

Finally I figure out that in ArenaNet’s dictionary “disarm” == “convert to friendly”.

I don’t dislike the general idea of having to do a fight with different skills than my normal ones. And I don’t dislike the general idea of having some of the new skills work with novel game mechanics in the fight. There are certain renown hearts and personal story steps that encourage or require usage of a different set of skills and I can’t remember being particularly annoyed at any of them. Some are fun.

However, I think the specific skills and mechanic used for this Canach fight are rather lame. We get a set of 5 skills. 3 do the exact same thing, just on different types of mines. And we don’t actually do very much with them. Scan mine, use skill on mine, make boss walk over mine… That’s it. It’s hardly even “combat”. Even putting aside the bugs and chatbox issue, I don’t find the mechanics of this fight to be interesting or compelling in a way that would make me want to do it again.

As much as I was overwhelmed by the dungeon of the previous living world update I must admit that this one has the opposite effect on me.Tried the solo dungeon and didn’t like it either but I ran the 5 man dungeon with my guild mates once and was done with it.

I agree for the most part, while Oculus was short it did have its own charms even with all the annoying flaws and I get the same feeling from this dungeon. As short, annoying and sloppy as it is you have to give credit to the designers for attempting to bring new life into our already staling dungeons. Who every made molten had shown us the high end of future dungeons and canach has now shown us the low.

So hopefully with this anet will have a stronger idea of where it needs to be.

There is an early human storyline quest that does a similarly stupid thing.
Gives you a completely new weapon and immediately throws you into a hard fight with Risen.
Hated it too and hoped very much I´ll never see this kittendroppings again.
Yet here we are.

I really hope ANet actually learns from this fiasco.

By now I can run Canach without a problem. Going back to it only because of that one gold and I somehow feel dirty afterwards.

Sir Black.7423:

I don’t dislike the general idea of having to do a fight with different skills than my normal ones. And I don’t dislike the general idea of having some of the new skills work with novel game mechanics in the fight. There are certain renown hearts and personal story steps that encourage or require usage of a different set of skills and I can’t remember being particularly annoyed at any of them. Some are fun.

However, I think the specific skills and mechanic used for this Canach fight are rather lame. We get a set of 5 skills. 3 do the exact same thing, just on different types of mines. And we don’t actually do very much with them. Scan mine, use skill on mine, make boss walk over mine… That’s it. It’s hardly even “combat”. Even putting aside the bugs and chatbox issue, I don’t find the mechanics of this fight to be interesting or compelling in a way that would make me want to do it again.

This is pretty much my thoughts on the matter. I actually liked the missions with the Mortis Verge and Caladbolg and the various others, although anything that involves changing up your skillbar should probably also grant some relatively easy stuff to practise on before it gets critical. I wouldn’t want it to happen too often because, hey, I like playing the character I made too, but variety and spice and all that.

The problem is this one wasn’t really all that interesting. A good portion of the challenge is simply figuring out what you’re supposed to do, and half of the difficulty comes from the various bugs like the mines spontaneously rearming. So, for a good alternate-skillbar mission, I’d say you really need the following:

1) An opportunity to learn the new skillbar before you hit the real challenge (CL had this, some others such as the Mortis Verge missions did not, especially if you go into the palace mission without having used the Verge earlier).

2) The mechanics of the new skillbar have to be interesting.

3) If you’re having the players deal with some strange mechanic, make sure that that mechanic is actually working as intended.

HawkMeister.4758:

By now I can run Canach without a problem. Going back to it only because of that one gold and I somehow feel dirty afterwards.

thats right its dirty gold, usual you have spend 15-20 mins in at least CoF path 1 to earn almost a gold after fighting several bosses, and mobs. but your picking on a guy who only real weapon is waiting for you to screw up and blow yourself up or get knocked into 1.

Zeke Minus.5720:

“I can’t press my attack button and make him die! This is a horribly designed encounter!”

Really, guys? Really?

I have nothing wrong with challenging content or even gimmick-based boss fights. The boss mini-games in dungeons like Citadel of Flame and Sorrow’s Embrace are fun but that is because you are doing it in a group.

It is enjoyable because you are able to share the experience of overcoming the gimmick with others. Doing something like that by yourself quickly becomes irritating.

Single player games may be based on figure out boss gimmicks or challenges by yourself, but single player games also have difficulty scaling that MMOs generally do not for those player who don’t want to waste their time and just see the story.

That also touches on my belief that story content meant to be a single player experience should not be the place to put up gates and obstacles with gimmicks or overly challenging content. The purpose of the solo story content should be to tell the story to the solo player.

Solo story-based content we have seen is generally single-shot and no one expects it to provide the epic loot of explorer mode dungeons. It should focus on effectively revealing and presenting the story, not wiping the solo player repeatedly so they can earn some amazing reward.

IMO the F&F solo dungeons were about the right balance. The fights were not push-overs but they did not rely on gimmicks as the Canach fight did or repeatedly kill the players like all the mobs outside the entrance to the Canach fight.

Wreave.2138:

My problem: “Disarm”

You’re told explicitly that the device “disarms” the mines, and using the wrong frequency causes them to blow up. So i try to knock Canach back into a still armed mines and try to blow up the mines by using the wrong frequency when Canach is in blast range but I’m just outside it. Hard enough to do — frustrating when I see him taking no damage.

Finally I figure out that in ArenaNet’s dictionary “disarm” == “convert to friendly”.

You too?! Thank goodness it wasn’t just me. I thought the solution to this particular puzzle was entirely counter-intuitive. It would have made more sense, and been more challenging, if I had had to use the armed mines to damage him while somehow avoiding defeat myself. I was doing exactly the same thing as you , at first, and setting up that positioning was no easy feat sometimes.

Canach fight is so utterly broken, it’s literally unbeatable for me. Horrible instance.

Zeke Minus.5720:

“I can’t press my attack button and make him die! This is a horribly designed encounter!”

Really, guys? Really?

Actually, for Canach, I simply spawned 3 Phantasmal Defenders (who have perma-retal) and let them tank him for me. With Signet of Illusions, he would only kill 2 of them, so I would just sit back and read the forums while he killed himself. I did it 3 times to try and get the achievement because the first time I got impatient, the 2nd time, I got unlucky, and the 3rd time, I waited.

Cirdan.9058:

Canach fight is so utterly broken, it’s literally unbeatable for me. Horrible instance.

Following my post on the thread below Niyo.5920 said that reloading the instance may fix the bugs that makes the instance completely unplayable, maybe that will work for you. But be warned that solution only worked the third time I reloaded the instance with my thief.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/southsun/Canach-Solo-fight-SUPER-Buggy/first#post2144137

I had a similar unplayable experience when I tried to run the boss as intended with a non-mesmer (no Retaliation, using the scanner and mines to damage Canach) .   Green mines will not explode with Canach literally on top of them (as seen in the screenshots in that thread) but green mines will detonate on my character.  

This fight is buggy and even when it worked it was disappointing and lacking entertainment. I really hope this is not an example of ArenaNet letting their standards of quality (in both design and implementation) slip.

Wake me up once this dungeon encounter is gone.

I was so let down too that I walked in and was suddenly just fighting him. I mean, realisticly it makes sense that Canach sees an intruder and just attacks, but it’s contrary to the whole GW2 theme. Where’s the monologuing? Where’s the “surrender or die” dialogue? Where’s the Canach voice saying “give up!!”

It felt very anti-climactic.

And why am I supposed to read the chat to know that he’s arming his mines? Shouldn’t that blink on screen or have an audible cue? Couldn’t Khiel be behind me screaming “look out, it’s gonna blow!”?

Seras.5702:

And why am I supposed to read the chat to know that he’s arming his mines? Shouldn’t that blink on screen or have an audible cue? Couldn’t Khiel be behind me screaming “look out, it’s gonna blow!”?

That is an excellent point. ArenaNet made such a big deal over GW2 having visual cues so we would be able to watch the action instead of focusing our attention on the UI.

Putting the critical mine-arming warnings in the chat window goes completely against this design goal. At least they have Canach going into a pose when he does something, but I found myself constantly needing to go to the chat window because there were no other clues. Audio ones would have made perfect sense.

In some ways it’s worse, we have never before had to look at the chat window to worry about important timing mechanics, have we? At least with special condition icons, like the frozen ground in the Claw of Jormag fight, we’ve gotten used to looking for them (even if they also don’t fit with that design goal).

Actually, I think there was a visual cue – he stops attacking and gets into a bit of a crouch. But yeah, having a more in-world explanation – such as Kiel calling it out – would have been better. After all, we get enough “It’s dropping poison from its wings!” spam when fighting the pinatas… I mean dragons.

I really just did not enjoy this fight at all. After being batted all over the cave by his knockback skill, I found that the way to beat it was to stand with my back against the wall and spam kick him into the same mine over and over again?

:I

This is not fun.