So last night we tried the path 2 AC, for the first time since the patch of course. Here’s my opinion on the changes:
- We had lvl 44 guardian (rebuilding his lvl 80 guardian for looks/race, experienced AC runner on various toons), lvl 80 warrior (soldier, experienced AC runner on various toons), lvl 80 engineer (inexperienced, not full exotic/rare), lvl 73 engineer (very inexperienced) and I brought my lvl 80 necro (cleric tank/well/mark) ’cause I heard some stuff and we were doing path 2.
- Firstly: I have an older system, run at relatively low settings at 1680×1050 and am quite used to FPS drops, but these mass spawns and additional particles/effects made things a lot harder. Add to that mobs that don’t render and massive amounts of CC and I’m a pretty sad panda, no matter how experienced I am.
- So we start at the spider queen: our very inexperienced member triggered the queen before we were even through the first gargoyles, so we wipe and npc is downed. That continued a few times, we had to wipe the team to kill enough of the hatchlings to even try and cope with the new queen set. Our warrior with 2H tanked her melee, our guardian couldn’t, our engineers were so squishie I had to spend most of my time healing them and getting their conditions off, rather then help with the actual killing. In the end we decided it was easier to not res the engineers and just tank spank her with 3 peeps. Not so much fun for the newbies.
- Champ Stalker: I had 9 fps just spammed my marks and wells, I heard it was going ok.
- Kohler: we decided to not even try a quick run, but test his new set up: it took us about as long, but the fight is a lot more entertaining (although certain combinations of adds make it really hard on lowbies). Again, my colour blindness and fps combined with certain adds makes it very hard for me to see kohler’s animations, but it’s not like my necro dies to his combo anyway.
- Mobs between the boss location and Kohler: quite annoying with all the cc and again so many mobs at once makes my fps drop to uncomfortably low compared to even wvw. We decide to not do the champ scavenger, some of us have families and couldn’t stay on for too long, so I bashed my creeps through him and we ran through. Takes a very long time for the mobs to reset, I can see you really want us to kill those.
- Defending Detha: this was easier in my opinion, but more importantly a lot more fun with what seemed like easier, but more mobs. Obviously our inexperienced squishy peeps needed some help, but that was fine.
- Ghost Eater: fun concept, little buggy, very hard to target him sometimes (again, fps, colour blindness but also amount of adds). Tricky to see the pain he can sometimes cause with/due to his AoE’s, but I managed to keep most of us up.
Rewards were crap, blues again (no magic find gear/food) and only 2-3 greens for the entire party, but we ran it for monthly and tears anyway.
In the end it was more annoying due to the buggy GE, the almost unforgiving Queen fight and the mob CC. I don’t dislike change, or increasing difficulty, but I don’t like it when those changes make it harder to show newbies/lowbies the ropes (or crash my fps).
