Guild Wars 2

I’ll add my 2 copper of support for the OP. I too think the damage output is way to high. Whether it’s just a scaling issue or some fundamental problem with mob mechanics or a graphics issue… I think it’s a combination of all three. I find that mobs in this game tend to spam their special attacks over and over with a very small cooldown, and although they telegraph their moves, often the tell animation is very brief and obscured by particle effects or the seething mass of mobs. You get a group of them together, especially ones that have been scaled in power, and their damage output is greatly amplified.

I enjoy challenging content. What I don’t like, and the OP mentioned the same thing, is getting insta-killed. For example, here is a typical southsun event: Event flag appears on my mini-map. Then large group of angry karka suddenly decloak from culling. Then I’m down. Total elapsed time is maybe 2-3 seconds. Adding insult to injury I look at my combat log and find 5-8 critical hits for anywhere up to 15k damage each that all landed in a space of about 1 second. Ridiculous. I might add, this is with a level 80 thief in nearly full exotic/ascended celestial gear with shadow arts trait line maxed out.

I think three things need to be done: 1) Lengthen the cooldown on mob power moves. 2) Improve the telegraph animation or perhaps add an audio cue to warn the player when the 1-shot kill is coming. 3) Add an graphics option to turn off spell particle effects. I think these things would greatly improve the player experience.

I can confirm many of the OPs observations. The number of harvesting nodes I am seeing is about the same, but I am seeing several issues related to mob loot drops:

1) The Nov 15th update drastically reduced the number and quality of world mob loot drops. The problem is present across all maps. Specifically, the frequency of blue/green/yellow armor and weapon drops is significantly less than before the update. The rate of crafting material drops seems to be about the same.

2) Magic find seems broken. I have a 144% MF set that I use for farming. Right now, I do not see any significant difference in drops using it versus my DPS set. So, I just use the DPS set since at least the mobs die faster.

3) Champions and veterans seldom drop loot, and when they do, it is the same quality as regular mobs. I am not seeing any increased frequency of rares.

I have made a few assertions and admittedly I have no firm statistics. However, I am an expert farmer and I’ll share an anecdote of exactly what I am seeing. Before the update, I could gather 30-35 rares in a 5 hour farming session of the shelter/penitent/fia/jofast event cycle in Cursed Shore using my MF gear. This was fairly consistent from September right through to the Nov 15th update, regardless of the bot invasion or whether I was grouped or not. Now, that same 5 hour session will net me 1-5 rares and much fewer greens. I still get about the same number of heavy moldy bags and coin. I see much more porous bones. I specifically cited Cursed Shore just now, but I see the same pattern in Frostgorge as well.

I am hoping this is a bug that is easily fixed because I did get a lot of enjoyment playing those events, and I was rewarded for participating in them with very lucrative drops. Dungeons seem unaffected by these problems, but I prefer to play in the world maps. Hopefully by posting here, a member of the dev team will see this and take a peek at the loot code.