Showing Posts For Lemaign.3529:
Do you not SEE the yellow-green globs raining from the sky? Does you instinct tell you to get hit by them instead of dodge them? I’m sorry, but if it’s inherent for a player to not avoid kitten from a boss, circle or no circle, cue or no cue, tell or no tell, then the problem is the player NOT the encounter.
I will concede that the encounter should reset upon wipe. But I will not agree with an overhaul of the encounter.
There is a difference between an intuitive challenge and being just plain crushed by indecipherable mechanics.
I have no problem with running in and being surprised by a million spiders. That’s fine if it feels like it’s part of the fight that I have to overcome. What I have a problem with is when the persistence of those spiders actively subverts the design of the fight, which is clearly unintentional, yet people defend it anyway and refuse to acknowledge the broken aspect of it, then turn around and attack the people struggling with it… and oddly, you seem to agree with this, so what are you accusing me of exactly? That’s what my entire post is about.
To clarify, I appreciate the spirit of what Anet is trying to do.
They want large scale battles, and they want to repopulate the mid to mid-high zones of the game. And thematically speaking, I love Scarlet and the Twisted Watchwork enemies.
Unfortunately, the method they use to facilitate all of this is the zerg. If they didn’t feel pressured to push out new content every 2 weeks, they could probably imagine something much better.
(edited by Lemaign.3529)
Nobody would zerg if it didn’t reward the players as well as it does. Anyone who says otherwise is a liar.
In case it’s not already clear, let’s examine the basic elements of zerg-style gameplay:
-Crowded, sometimes overflowing servers that occasionally block people from experiencing the content
-Abysmal framerates, and waypoints that take forever to load
-No skill whatsoever, unless you consider battling the game’s awful tab targeting a real skill. Framerates are too low and fights are too cluttered and messy to even tell what’s going on (effects LOD does practically nothing btw). I don’t feel like I’m fighting as much as mashing buttons and being carried by 100 other nameless strangers.
-Blind, frantic waypointing, which just feels stupid. Lots of time you’ll show up to an event and everything will be dead by the time the waypoint loads. Furthermore, it discourages actually traveling through the zone and makes the game world feel flat; heaven forbid you should actually have to utilize all the magnificent, beautifully crafted terrain.
-Tagging is the name of the game. Forget that creative build you spent hours theorycrafting because it’s better to just load up your zerker gear and hit things hard.
Read all of the above. Which part sounds like fun? None of them do.
Why? Because none of them mention champ bags.
get there faster and do more damage
Question: “I have this problem, how do I solve it?”
Answer: “Stop having the problem.”
These kinds of responses help nobody. Go somewhere else.
OP, the only advice I can offer is to look for a party to join. Either bring some friends, or ask in map chat and self invite. If you’re in a party you just have to hit the mob once, and it will add your damage to a cumulative total based on the entire party. You will probably still miss some tags if you show up late, but your chances will improve.
I personally feel that the damage-based tagging is annoying and inherently flawed, and it wouldn’t be a problem if the major, most rewarding content didn’t revolve around following a zerg but we’re stuck with it. Hope this helps.
It is an issue that turns people off, though, and that’s kind of serious, at least from the perspective of someone who would rather enjoy content and have fun than get burnt out on repeatedly running instances. Anet built this game up as being anti-grind and anti-loot treadmill. Having to park myself in an instance and run each path for 8 days to get a set feels very grindy, it’s almost no different than farming an instance in WoW to get items to drop, the difference being that the time sink is somewhat mitigated, but even in WoW you could get lucky and get your item on the first run sometimes.
It’s not that we want easy gear, it’s that we don’t want to feel arbitrarily constrained in how we obtain the gear; it goes against the whole design philosophy of this game.
(edited by Lemaign.3529)
In order to defeat the last boss of TA F/U, the best way to solo carry a horrible pug is to use a guardian and use this OP build, you will literally be able to roll your face on the keyboard and the boss will die along with all spiders.
It is sad that we have to use a broken ridiculously overbuffed set up to deal with this equally broken encounter but until anet fixes it it is the only way for us get the rewards we deserve.
A lot of people seem to be championing this as more “L2P” nonsense, but Wukunlin is just explaining how to beat the fight in its current state. It is not a “working as intended, stop whining” post. Please don’t take it out of context.
I’m also surprised at the number of people defending this path. Bosses like this are neither intuitive nor fun.
People need to realize that we don’t want free loot, we don’t want easy-mode, we don’t want “giant neon dodge now” signs. We want encounters that are challenging and fun. This boss is neither, it just feels cheap. When you walk in for the first time without any prior knowledge of how the fight works you just wipe immediately and are left scratching your head. This would be fine if the game offered intuitive ways to figure out how the fight works, but it doesn’t. Instead you waste lots of time and repair costs dying over and over because the fight doesn’t provide clear visual feedback or reset properly, and you have no way of actually knowing this other than the fact that it just feels impossible. As a last ditch you’re forced to go to the forums, where the answer is “GET GUD.” Yeah, thanks community. An actual suggested strategy according to the official wiki is “If the party failed to take down the Nightmare Tree on the first try, restart the dungeon instance and try again.” How in the sweet hopping kitten is this okay? In what universe does resetting the instance still feel like being part of a world? Garbage like this pulls me right out of the experience, there’s absolutely no way it’s intentional, and if it is intentional it’s just plain sloppy.
I’m glad the rest of you (metagamers and class-appropriates) can beat this guy without any problems, but you need to admit that the fight shouldn’t work this way.
If the most successful way to beat an encounter revolves around forum scouring and meta-gamey strategies, it’s poorly designed. This fight is poorly designed. Period.
This has been the most lucrative update put into the game, can you really blame people for wanting to make money while they can instead of grinding out in open world right now? It’s not going to last forever, have some patience, the game isn’t just about you.
But that’s precisely the problem. Content like this rewards people for confining themselves to a small area of the game and mindlessly zerging for hours. That shouldn’t be the most attractive thing about a game. Anet always preached about how anti-grind they wanted GW2 to be, so why are they releasing content that encourages grinding?
I know they were trying to get more people out into the world by introducing the balloons, but it doesn’t work well. People show up get their chest and leave, and then those zones become empty and boring again because they have absolutely no reason to be there.
Anet needs to give us a reason to stay out in the world. There are so many beautifully crafted environments that just go to waste because you only have to explore them once, and then there’s no reason to go back. They need to introduce some good, permanent content that makes players want to park themselves out in the world in various locations.
As it stands right now there’s very little reason to pay for this place. Here are the reasons.
LACK OF MERCHANTS: No Black Lion weapon skin merchants, no dungeon merchants, no Zhaitaffy merchant, and probably a few others I’m forgetting. If the Terrace is going to be worth the cost, it really should give you every possible reason to go there instead of LA. The lack of these merchants sort of kills it for me. At the very least the dungeon merchants should be available.
LIMITED PORTAL: The portal should also link to Ebonhawke and Fort Trinity, as well as the pact bases. If I’m going to pay 300 gems for this, I want as few loading screens as possible.
NO FLAVOR: No clever banter, no clever dialogue, no unique NPCs. At least some merchants that sell unique fun consumables or account bound crafting mats from heart vendors would make the place much more attractive. Instead it feels extremely small, dull, and unimpressive, which leads in to my next point.
NO PRESTIGE: In other MMOs, VIP areas are impressive to some degree. For example, in SWTOR the VIP area sat above the hub town at the top of a sleek express elevator. I never went up there, but man it made me a little jealous. The Terrace doesn’t provide that kind of prestige at all. We get a small corner where nobody travels in the middle of a town that practically nobody visits to begin with, which will go back to being dead again after the Jubilee is over.
These are minor gripes I know, and I’m not going into full detail about everything that’s disappointing about this place. The silence is nice at least, as is the free port to DR. However, I still think the lack of features need to be addressed. I just bought a pass for 300 gems and I’m probably going to end up using LA a lot anyway. Feels like a waste.
Please give me a better reason to park here Anet!
I’m shocked at the number of people defending this event. Take a look at this stuff.
The Zerging:
It’s just dumb. Sorry to say, but it’s stupid. We already have Orr for the people who want to do that. Making it one of the primary activities of this event just seems insulting. There’s no creativity to this, it’s just a big arena with limitlessly spawning mobs and occasional legendary enemies. Drop your AoE ring and try not to die, collect your drops, do this all day. This does not sound in line with the “grindless” design philosophy. To make matters worse it’s almost necessary to do if you expect to keep up with the rapidly inflating economy. I really don’t like that. Anet loves to talk about how anti-grind the game is supposed to be, and then they deliberately introduce content that feels like an upscaled version of the same kind of progression we saw in games like FFXI. And yes, money is progression in this game. With no real “endgame” to speak of, money is pretty much the biggest goal unless you’re turned on by the PvP, which I’m not.
The Gauntlet:
Seriously, this was a very good idea. I actually like a lot of the fights and beating them can be satisfying. But I find it very difficult to enjoy because of how inconvenient everything about it is. I will reiterate: I AM BAFFLED BY THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE DEFENDING THIS. A lot of people don’t seem to understand that we’re not complaining about the difficulty; most people enjoy challenges. What we don’t like is being punished by things that shouldn’t be factors of difficulty. The domes that screw around with your camera are just astonishingly bad by design. The active zerg happening underneath you makes matters worse by severely dropping FPS and causing input delay problems, which is just inexcusable when several of the fights require precise timing on your evades. Many aspects of the Liadri fight, like the unshootable orbs and the Fields of Relentless Pet Killing, neutralize the advantages many classes can bring to the fight. Combine this with the too subtle one-shot AoE circles and awful tab targeting and you end up with boss fights that feel more like you’re battling the UI than the actual boss. And then of course let’s not forget that you’re being actively punished for failing by having to cover ticket, repair, and in many cases waypoint costs. Someone in a different thread said that beating these fights feels more like a relief than a reward, and I’d have to agree with that assessment. This should be challenging by gameplay design, which it would be if the majority of your interface weren’t fighting against you.
The Torch Race:
How disappointing! Anet had a huge opportunity to capitalize on the great architecture in DR by making an interesting race around the various districts. But instead of making it remotely creative by structuring it like a jumping puzzle, or at least trying to make it challenging in some way, they just dropped a bunch of braziers in a circle and said “yeah this looks good.” This is the polar opposite of the Gauntlet; it’s terribly thought out, but in favor of being far too easy and boring and just overall not compelling.
The Balloons:
Could be worse, but it still kind of confuses me. I like the scavanger hunt aspect to it, but these are supposed to be convenient, free rides to DR right? So why do I have to waste time fighting champions or aetherblades or (ugh) escorting dignitaries? Also many of the balloons feel like they were just dropped in random spots in the terrain; many of the stairs clip through terrain, and some are directly on top of enemy clusters. Seems kind of sloppy. Furthermore, how come I have to get teleported back to the bottom of the stairs when the gates close? No logic behind this design decision, the events are easily soloable, but they take longer than necessary and the teleporting just feels like a way to strong arm people into doing them.
In conclusion: <throws hands up in the air like an NBA player mad at the ref>
In general this content feels like a step back to me. Flame and Frost was good. Southsun was alright. Zephyrites was great. I don’t know what the hell this is. I think there would be far fewer complaints about it if it had more polish, but it just feels rushed.