Showing Posts For Jim Travakh.7495:
The biggest problem with this map is the fact that if there’s a leaver on either side, the match is very likely to go 500-0 and the losing team gets absolutely nothing, which is frustrating when you sit in queue for 5 minutes to waste another 10 getting smashed because of the 4v5.
But this is probably intended by anet.
Owing to the recent sale, I decided to buy some bank slots. Unfortunately, it turns out I bought one too many – I was unaware there was a limit to the number of bank slots an account can have, and the in game UI did not tell me there was a limit of 8 (and actually implies a limit of around ten – see attached screenshot and ‘blank space’ in the bank UI).
So I wasted a small amount of gems on a bank expansion item that is unusable in every way – it’s account bound, yet my account has the maximum number of bank slots. It’s not a huge deal in the end, but would a possible refund of that bank slot item be possible? If not, could you guys at least correct the UI so others don’t make the mistake I do? (Either put a Bank Tab X / 8 indicator to clearly denote a maximum of 8 tabs, or removal of that empty space in the bank scroll)
I was going to post a rant here, but I decided against it.
Suffice to say that client hangs due to memory addressing errors in 60+ minute dungeons that are 75% luck based (as in, praying that someone doesn’t d/c or have a client crash due to shoddy coding) are unacceptable.
If it was a design decision to cause client crashes to increase the difficulty of the fractal, that’s fine, just don’t paper it over as a bug and promise that it’ll be fixed. If it’s a technical problem that takes more than a month to be fixed, hire better engineers, there are plenty in the valley
I assumed it leveled up randomly and didn’t bother questioning it
Given how easy the dungeons are and how there’s a general lack of gearchecks (Simin notwithstanding), there’s no place for player gear checking. It creates a catch-22 for pugs (must have dungeon exo gear to farm dungeon exo gear) and the players who ‘need’ to gearcheck to filter players are the type of trashy, incompetent player that can’t do content until there’s a huge wiki and video guide for them to slavishly adhere to so they can get carried by the players who actually learned the content and cleared it. Or, they’re the type of imbecile that tries to pug speedclear, which is another barrel of laughs
gear checking, along with other cancer like dps meters or whatever, are features demanded by the impaired so they can substitute metrics for skill
This dungeon wasn’t bugged as of 8 days ago. How do they manage to break working content?
I just attempted the mode. You’ll need 5 high dps (read: berserker warriors) players and a willingness to zerg rush to get past the first golem, as doing it the way Anet presumably intended (as in, killing the waves) is impossible, even with the highest dps specs and builds in the game. You instead just rush past them, bash down the golem, die, let the accrued mobs run past, then do some more rushing to get past Nokk.
It’s hard to believe there are any testers in this game, because if they try to make the claim that it’s doable with a team in blues and greens the ‘normal’ way they’re blatantly lying
Clearing dungeons is fine, and in my opinion the dungeons are comically easy. I’m referring to speedruns in particular, which is a form of dungeon clearing that evolved because there was no particular reason to kill trash and that the only metric for a run is speed. The prevalence of wannabe speedrunners turns pug runs that are otherwise very easy into silly slogs where people do things that are outside design intention and are counterintuitive, namely running past trash until it leashes back.
It creates an unhealthy pug environment when pugs start thinking the ‘speedrun’ clear is the proper way to do dungeons, and they wind up failing because 2/5 can’t skip the trash properly. This is distinct from, for example, 2/5 players causing a fail at simin due to low dps, because that’s an explicit mechanics challenge for the encounter.
Encouraging people to clear trash for a boosted karma/xp/gold reward or the chance at unique drops would alleviate the problem (and yes there is a problem in pugs right now).
I have no problem with speedrunning, having spent considerable effort posting good times (14 minute butcher, 26 minute warden arah, 41 minute human arah, 19 minute frontdoor coe) for fun.
I’m making two points: design guides player actions, and the knowledge required to speedrun creates an additional level of metaknowledge that the average pug is unlikely to know, which will result in more grief and annoyance in dungeons that are otherwise simple and easy to run. Players understand that they’re expected to know dungeon mechanics, but a full knowledge of safe trash vs dangerous trash and skip routes is too high a knowledge threshold for the average pug, and the average pug shouldn’t be skipping trash. The problem is with that very same risk/reward system you mention that gives zero motivation towards clearing trash at all.
If we start from a base assumption that we want dungeon pug runs to be, at a minimum, an enjoyable experience, then we want to encourage design decisions that cause the dungeon to be more enjoyable. If we assume that the average pug player is not great, then we encounter problems. Pugs that flail around and fail at trash skips are not enjoyable, so there should be a design-level encouragement for clearing trash.
This isn’t a problem with people not wanting to do Arah, it’s a problem with the LFG system. On blackgate there are regular Arah pubs, and I’ve found groups in overflow.
Wait for the LFG revamp, which is probably going to be in sometime in 2018
Problem: PuGs try to speedrun and fail at it, because there’s zero reward for clearing trash and most pugs cannot skip the dangerous trash safely. This results in a more unpleasant general experience as groups splinter between the players who can successfully run past things and the new players who cannot.
Solution: Encourage clearing of trash by giving a bonus modifier at the end based on the % of trash you cleared. Clear 0-50% of trash, get the normal reward, clear 75% of trash, get another 25% bonus xp/gold/karma at the end, clear 100% of trash get another 50% bonus xp/gold/karma. Or, add low-drop-rate unique drops to dungeon trash that drops at random, like unique town clothes or skins.
I have done all the dungeon paths multiple times, in both pugs and teams, but pugs are becoming less and less competent due to the number of silly players obsessively skipping trash. The meta-knowledge of what trash is safe to skip versus what isn’t is creating a higher entrance barrier for new players.
I’d like to know why karma was removed from dungeons specifically.
The events in the dungeon (each boss and bonus event) give the same reward as events outside (17k xp and 1.86s) but no karma. If it’s a matter of farming the same opening boss over and over there’s already a DR system for that. My warrior’s been pinned at 30k karma for a very long time because he does dungeons basically exclusively
There are safespots on his platform that any class can stand on and autoattack.
The path in total takes 70-80 minutes if you dont wipe on lupi and down Simin in 3 or 4 minutes. The boss is a dps check.
Every group had a horribly rough time in Arah while they were learning mechanics, but that first batch of people teach others/make long posts about how to clear content. Give me 4 random but competent players and I could coach them through sylvari route in maybe 2 hours
There does need to be some kind of per-boss reward that isn’t vendor trash, though. An easy way to motivate people would be giving each dungeon sets of unique armor skins that can only be obtained by drops and drops randomly – 1% chance off trash, 10% chance off bosses, pieces are totally random (i.e. can get heavy armor even if you’re on a light class) but the pieces themselves can be traded in for tokens. This way people who really want the skin will go grind the dungeon, and people who dont care will happily take free tokens
When people have to look for groups on the forums you know that the in-game LFG system isnt up to snuff
4 sparks? I’ve tried this boss three times, and each time it spawns 5 sparks when she stealths. Never seen only 4.
On the first phase transition you only have to pull 4 of the 5 to the statue points
Which is exactly why this encounter fails. It isn’t based on player skill. A skilled group of players won’t beat her if they don’t have the DPS. And in a game that prides itself on having combat that requires skill that’s pretty poor design.
It’s the one encounter in the game where gear matters, but I’ll pass on judging it. It’s an encounter like any other and after the mechanics are discovered it comes down to preparing for it.
Also keep in mind there are dps discrepancies between classes – Simin will be difficult without a solid warrior or two, and will also be difficult without a timewarp mesmer. The gear check is whatever but it’s the class separation that’s the real problem.
I posted the strat in another thread, but Simin is a DPS check and you need to treat it as such. On the first spark spawn you only need to pull 3 or 4 sparks to remove the regen.
So you slow dps to 50, pull 4 sparks fast, then enter 2nd dps stage from 60% – you have to burn Simin to around 15% hp before it restealths. Pull 5 sparks, then burn from 30→0
groups that are incapable of doing this usually have someone who isn’t dps geared and specced – when everyone’s in berserker’s and you have a timewarp the boss becomes a 4 minute trivial. but then you have to ask whether ANet really wants gearchecks in their dungeons, or how they pretty much blatantly lied when they said their team of 5 in crappy blues managed to do the encounter
I don’t play a ranger, but I’ve noted that several rangers have had difficulty putting their pets away when attempting to do careful pulls or on bosses where the pet is another trigger point for abilities (alpha, giganticus) . When a class feature becomes a huge liability, the class becomes instantly unworkable for dungeons and people will actively avoid inviting rangers.
I wrote a long screed here but upon reflection it sounded like a psychotic rant, so I’ll just say the voice clip is very annoying when repeated constantly and should either be removed, or the npcs placed farther away from the bank.
There are plenty of people doing arah EX. But the only farmable path is sylvari, the others are an awful mess.
so most people login, do sylvari, then logout. wait for the new LFG
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Simin-High-Priestess-of-Dwayna/first#post349115
It’s not bugged, you just have to down it in the first phase.
I’m not one to complain about difficulty, and I’m not going to do so here, I’d just like to ask if the boss’s current behavior is intended, and whether the encounter was playtested. I’ll go into detail about what I observed about the boss.
The encounter is straightforward – the boss has two phases and switches between them. In phase 1, she spams a bunch of relatively harmless aoe and petrifies one person, but otherwise we just burn and dps her down till the 50% point. In phase 2 she vanishes (but can still be hit), regenerates a very large amount of health per second, and spawns 5 invulnerable npcs that have to be pulled into 5 spots in order to stop the regeneration and drop her back into phase 1. The fight is mechanically simple and it’s difficult to wipe.
The problem is that the boss must be killed within the first two phase transitions, since the first only requires 4 sparks to be pulled in. So drop to 50%, pull 4, it comes back at 55, burn all cooldowns drop to 20, pull 5, and kill 35->0.
This is fine, but there’s absolutely no hint that you’re doing something wrong if you fail the second dps check. What will occur is that you’re stuck there forever driving it back and forth – hide at 40%, heal out to 60, drop to 40 ad infinitum. The fact that we realized the first transition only required 4 sparks was a huge fluke.
Again, once we figured it out the boss was downed in 4 minutes of balls out dps, but we spent hours on it beforehand just smashing it and watching it heal, with no hint or indication that the boss had entered a near-unwinnable state. This isn’t fun design, this is design solely intended to make people angry.
(edited by Jim Travakh.7495)
Timings are different for different dungeons. Some are notoriously fast and others are long slogs.
Most explore modes require each player to learn mechanics and execute (read: dodge) in boss encounters but it’s no big deal. voicechat is nice but not required. You can do explore mode dungeons without having done the story, only the guy who enters the dungeon first needs to have done story.
An idea for timings
HotW Butcher Run – personal fastest was 19 minutes, average pug will do in 30
CoE teleporter – ran in 27 minutes, pug in 40
Arah sylvari – my fastest was 73 minutes, pugs take between 90-110
The earth line drive damage isn’t usually lethal and you can soak a hit and heal. Spread out a bit and it’ll only hit one person, no big deal.
Crystals aren’t lethal half the time and you’ll simply come out of them. The other half of the time, throw a combat rez.
People in this game have the idea where they think if they execute perfectly they’ll never get downed. You expect to go down on Alpha and receive a combat rez.
The one where the submarine busts through the wall is bugged.
Fortunately dungeon POIs aren’t counted towards anything, though.
“Tries to exploit, breaks the instance, posts that it should be fixed”
It should be fixed in that it explicitly tells me ‘ha ha no you can’t do that’, and then tells me to go back on my main character to finish up. Or, if it’s intended, to let me clear the dungeon anyway, without the dungeon breaking. Since it doesn’t do that, I’m asking here what the dungeon is supposed to do.
I was doing AC explore mode, so any character higher than 35 can still be effective for the final boss encounter. You get roughly 70% of a level off a dungeon, and my main has little use for the piles of xp he’s accumulating. It’s just that my main is geared for speedclearing and my alt is a not-particularly-useful engineer.
edit: Dungeon owner logging off causes everyone to just get kicked out of the dungeon, IIRC. Which is bad, but better than splitting the party into multiple instances.
(edited by Jim Travakh.7495)
Someone suggested as a fast leveling method, I do dungeons on my 80 main character, and right before the final boss reward I switch to an alt to claim the xp.
I did this and the dungeon ended up breaking – the alt entered a new instance, and when I went back onto the first character it entered that new instance, so I was unable to link up with my party. Party members who zoned out and back in also entered the new instance and were unable to return.
I understand if this behavior is intended, because cheese leveling alts this way is pretty silly, but if it is intended it shouldn’t fully break the dungeon, and I should be able to get back in on the first character and clear it as normal.
Critical damage. I did the math and condition damage needs a buff. Raw data:
Gear is all-exo. 3/6 berserker’s 3/6 rampager’s for the purpose of testing, weapon is a rampager’s rifle with sigil of earth. Traiting distribution is 20/30/0/0/20 glass cannon. What I modified was jewelry between 5/5 berserker’s or 5/5 rampager’s.
With the berserker’s jewelry set I have 3159 attack, 58% crit, +68% critical damage, and 634 condition damage.
With rampager’s I have 3103 attack, 65% crit, +36% critical damage, and 949 condition damage.
Going out into the wild and testing:
Rampager’s autoattack shots do 350 damage base, critting for 650, and bleeding for 90 damage a tick. My bleeds are extended roughly 80% so I get ten ticks of bleed, and I have two additional possible procs of bleed (33% and 60% on critical), so each shot is on average worth 350 + 195 (crit) + 900 (guaranteed base bleed) + 200 (33% bleed) + 360 (60% bleed) = 2005 damage.
With the berserker’s jewelry set, I auto for 380 critting for 800, with bleeds ticking at 74. 380 + 244 + 740 (guaranteed bleed) + 142 + 258 (other bleeds) = 1764 damage.
So by rotating to rampager’s, the rifle autoattack loses about 250 dps.
The problem here is when you factor in skills that don’t have guaranteed bleeds, and thus frontload all their damage. Volley, for instance, does another 2-3k damage with berserker’s. Killshot crits for 6k under rampager’s but does 10k with berserker’s. Might improves condition damage and power, and the improvement to power will vastly scale against both your critical rate and the crit damage buff. In exchange for the 250 dps on autoattack each of the other attacks becomes retardedly buff, and this is under full traits and runes for maximizing bleed damage. Swords are actually worse because of the relatively large damage on the sword autoattack swings which comprise most of a sword warrior’s damage.
so yeah condition damage is never worth it on warriors, at least
I’ve done most content while pugging.
Dungeons require a minimum level of execution from every player in the group, and every player needs to understand the encounter mechanics. After that hurdle, things are easy.
But dungeons are impossible if you have dead weight, and quite frankly very many players are dead weight. In this case the fault lies with poor players and not the dungeons, though many of the dungeons could use bugfixes
I was just now in a group for Twilight Arbor story mode, got to final boss, someone left so I zoned out and went to Lion’s Arch to find a 5th. Came back, and when I attempted to enter the instance, I and the person I found were put into a freshly spun story instance, with the npcs waiting for me to trigger them. The other 3 members were still staring at the boss. The typical tricks of logging out and back in or logging into alts and back failed, there was no ‘join in’ option, and when the other 3 zoned out and back in they were also put into the new instance, forcing us to start over (actually we just quit)
The person who left was not the instance owner, and I’ve been able to zone out and add replacements in before, so something went wrong here
There’s always people that want to do dungeons, since they’ll want tokens to gear alts or start building legendaries. What you’re actually asking for is a competent, server-wide LFG system with stated reasons, so you can pick people up from the LFG list and know that they’re interested in doing the dungeon you want to do.
Each time I take a group of brand new people into Arah and explain to them how Giganticus works, we down it in a couple of attempts. It’s not difficult.
The problem is that there’s a lot of people utterly reliant on a wiki to explain to them how everything works, so they don’t realize his 2nd phase aoe has a max range and they just keep eating it
Alright, I’ve just done Honor of the Waves on plunderer route. My group is a pug that started on butcher, doing a full hotw clear, and we were all together doing the dungeon at the same time. So nobody had done a ‘speedclear’.
Butcher was fine, everyone got 60, but plunderer just gave half the group 45 tokens. We finished it at exactly 5:11 pm, and the other half of the group got 60. The rewards are inconsistent with identical behavior, since my group was working since about 3pm. If we were clearing ‘too quickly’, then the DR should have been applied to each member of the group consistently.
So if someone in the group had been speedclearing ‘too quickly’, yet the group has done pretty much the same dungeons together for a solid amount of time and posted identical times for the groupmates, why did DR affect some players in the group but not others? And if DR was in effect, why would it not reset at the 5pm rollover?
I should note that I personally got my 60 tokens out of each path, but since I was there playing with my party members there’s no way any of them were somehow speedclearing faster than I was
(edited by Jim Travakh.7495)
Do you truly think they won’t discover how it works sooner or later? All of this is just punishing legitimate players. I have no idea when my timer will be up and i’m still getting shafted rewards even after days that i did a dungeon.
That’s kind of surprising, given that the latest patch has been out for about sixteen hours.
I’m fairly sure it’s supposed to reset daily, but that’s why I’m asking to confirm
The only way the dungeon resets in the way you describe is if all 5 people d/c at the same time for 15 minutes. Otherwise you either politely wait for your 5th to reconnect, or you slot in another person and move on.
While I can agree with that sentiment in some ways, is it intended for the first run of any given explorable path on a day to yield anything other than 60 tokens? Because that was a bug many of my groups encountered with inconsistent rewards on completion.
if by ‘sub boss’ you mean the trash before his gate, you can pull those singly and kill them one by one. this isn’t difficult, just time consuming
and no, the bosses after giganticus are all quite easy
Giganticus can and is easily beaten by ungeared 80s in blues and greens. The fight requires execution.
If you want a tip, his aoespam on phase 2 has a maximum range.
A dungeon finder in of itself is hit or miss.
What we do need is for the LFG system to let you put down exactly what you’re looking to do, and have it be either global, or zone + major cities, because most people now just spam outside the dungeon or in lion’s arch
nobody uses the LFG system as designed because you have no idea what they’re looking to do (story? explore? just clearing the map? farming events? which explore path? speedclear?) and spam inviting people who are LFG without knowing what they want to do is rude
I have 100% map complete and all explorer achievements, and I’m at 98% on the title progression
The guess is that either it’s still bugged or you need the full dungeon explorer achievement as well
The comparator maps I’m using must be incomplete, then. Oh well
More importantly there’s no way 4 untagged areas is 3% world
I spent some time tonight hunting zones and I’m at 163/165 maguuma and 170/172 shiverpeaks, all else done. been there done that is at 97% though…
just to confirm, an ‘area’ is a named region on the map, right? Every area will be named and marked once discovered?
On Blackgate-US, Honor of the Waves has been putting people in different explorable instances, if they manage to get in at all. There’s no message prompt when someone enters, and if party members walk through the portal either they get the choice of story/explore which puts them in a new instance, or the ‘join party explore mode’ button does nothing. Full party of 5, tested later with just me and a friend, no dice
Thank you, I just got it, and I feel less intelligent now.
A day or two ago I purchased 3 character slots and received 8. Not that I’m complaining, but I’m pretty sure it’s still a bug.
I am missing precisely 1 POI in the world away from 100% map completion.
Problem is, I’ve received the 100% reward for every zone I’ve entered, and I have screenshot evidence. Each city, all zones, all 4 wvw areas. When I had 10 POIs in WvW left before 100%, I took a screenshot and marked them so whenever my world had access to them I could check them off as I took them. You can see I’m missing 10 POIs in this screenshot, and I’ve marked the ten I did not have at that time.
I cleared those ten after a couple of days, yet am somehow still missing one POI. I’ve received the 100% reward for all four wvw zones.
I’m completing a tour of the pve world to check if somehow any of the zones are missing a POI, but since I distinctly remember each 100% I find I doubt I’m going to come across that last POI.
Anyone else have this problem?
EDIT: Just finished visiting every zone in the game, each one says I’m 100% complete, with no missing POI.
(edited by Jim Travakh.7495)