Guild Wars 2

Yeah, ran into the same problem, also in the final phase. Happened in multiple attempts.

Yes, please do change it!

This was seriously delightful. My husband and I did it together with no guide, and just had a blast. The sound design on the hatchlings is disgustingly creepy, which means making them go “splat” was extra satisfying. The directional sound with headphones on was great too. Overall, a really fun variation on the other scavenger hunts.

Yeah, and some fractals, like snowblind, you can’t run back to the beginning anyways. I can’t see it making more sense to let you teleport to the hub without resetting things – I imagine that would add a host of other trade-offs, like access to vendors mid-dungeon and such.

My apologies for adding a general proposal so near to the end, but this is something that has driven myself and other members of my guild a bit crazy, and I just have time now to post it.

Proposal Overview
Add repair anvils to each fractal instance

Goal of Proposal
Encourage groups that desire it to challenge and improve themselves by pushing against their current skill/gear limit, by allowing repairs within fractal instances.

Proposal Functionality
For my guild, fractals started to get really interesting and fun when we started to hit the upper limits of what our group AR/skill level could handle. We had repeated wipes on certain boss fights, but with each attempt, everyone improved and we got closer to beating them. This was really exciting and satisfying, until armor started to break, and we had no easy way to repair for another go, especially as we were on fractal 3. Despite wipes, we actually otherwise having a pretty good time, and didn’t want to just quit.

Currently, 4/5 party members in fractals can repair their armor using alt-F4 to disconnect, then rejoin their group after repairing. The instance owner cannot. I guess most groups get around this by bringing spare gear, or by purchasing repair canisters. This all seems unnecessarily awkward, and can give the impression that the game is pushing you towards the cash shop.

I think this is also exacerbated now that the longer/harder fractals come at the end of a run. Non-fractal-pros, like myself, may not realize that their group is running with low AR until they hit Fractal 3 or the boss fractal. I feel like the game should facilitate giving such groups the opportunity to overcome the challenge, rather than adding more layers of frustration. If tougher, more challenging fights are to come (yes please!), then I think adding within-fractal repairs will make meeting those challenges more fun.

Associated Risks
If I recall correctly from the pre-release days, armor repair is meant to act as both a gold sink, which it would continue to do here, and a mechanism by which the game signals to players that they are hitting an upper limit as to what their gear or skill can handle. Adding repair stations to each fractal instance might make this signal less strong, such that players can just keep repairing, and throwing themselves at content without adjusting their strategy.

Wow, this just goes to show how subjective aesthetics are. I rather like the change, and am eyeing the T3 light. I know the change to the female medium is tempting a friend to start playing his ranger again. I like that the dyes seem to have more fidelity to their “in the bottle” color now. On the other hand, I can see being bummed about losing some of the shininess and detail, though I guess I enjoy the slightly more matte look personally.

I finally got to W2 post patch (I’ve been working on W1 achievements. So nice that they brought those back!). Z1 was a lot of fun, and for me at least, not too hard. I loved jumping across logs at the waterfalls, and the bears really cracked me up. I can see myself getting back in that zone to work at finding all the secrets. Z2 definitely suffers from being a bit long. There are lots of fun, challenging jumping parts that I would have enjoyed a lot more if I hadn’t died like 50 times to the assassins as well. Why can’t I figure out how to freaking kill them??? Grr. -_- I imagine they would be easier if I wasn’t playing solo though.

At any rate, I am really enjoying W2 for the most part. Looking forward to tackling Z3 with fresh eyes tonight. I think this is great and fun content, and I’m definitely looking forward to seeing the whole thing! Thanks Josh and team for all the hard work and creativity.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

I am indeed giving him a second look. What’s likely to happen is that the fire shield will apply a negative effect to the person who made the mistake instead of hurting the entire group.

Thank-you Anthony! We’re mostly having fun with the bounty hunts, so I’m glad to hear they’re still getting polished more. I can only imagine all the unintended interactions that occur when you have 4 or 5 guilds all hunting a bounty at once.

For Sotzz, he drops a pool of alcohol that makes him invulnerable. You’ve got to wear down his defiant and knock him out of it. We’ve managed it once, but it took some pretty solid coordination on mumble.

I’m going to add my voice to the Komali-related frustration. While the tactics I’ve seen posted for that fight seem pretty do-able, we could not, for the life of us, get the fire shield off. Two different guild groups had convened on him at the same time, and without coordination in teamspeak, it seemed like his stability and might kept coming back, never mind that a poorly timed attack from either side gave him some 35 stacks of defiant, making cc pretty much impossible. Add to that the fact that we were both on our timer, and needed to kill him, but were unintentionally griefing each other by increasing the difficulty of the fight. I’m sure the whole encounter left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth.

From the description, I imagine his fight is fun and do-able with a small group, and would be pretty cool in an instance or on a low-population server where it is less likely that large groups like this will wind up with the same target. I hope the devs will give him a second look – it is unfortunate when the design of a fight makes me unhappy to see other players, when the rest of the game is so nicely designed to have the opposite effect.

I posted on this elsewhere, but just spotted this thread. We had him despawning before anyone could even start a dialog with him. I watched him fall out of his barrel, stand up, then disappear before I could even interact.

I could see this becoming an issue if another guild is fighting him somewhere on the map. If you don’t get lucky and find the fight, and they take a while to kill him, you could waste 5+ minutes of your bounty time looking for barrels that aren’t there, and a boss that won’t spawn. I guess this could be an issue with the pathing bounties too.

I’m actually in a similar situation to Ahkaskar. We ran our third guild bounties night last night, with a team of 15, and it was mainly an exercise in frustration and disappointment. I think the idea is amazing, some of the bosses are really fun and when it goes well, the mad rush to find and defeat them is pretty cool. We did our first one successfully last week, and it was pretty darn cool when it went well.

However, this week was a pretty poor showing. We drew Sotzz twice in a row. TWICE. And I can only conclude that he is actually bugging out sometimes. At least three times, he spawned for someone out of the barrel, then despawned before they could even talk to him, let alone start combat. We managed to fight him once, and figured out his mechanics but ran out of time on our bounty. When we drew him the second time in a row, it was 15 minutes of (somewhat halfhearted at this point) wandering around looking for barrels where occasionally someone would find him and he would bug out (despawn before anyone could even start dialog with him). We didn’t even get to try to fight him that time. And that was it. Good luck getting a group enthused for another try after that. I get that we could be more efficient looking for him, once we learn the spawn areas and stuff, but to have him bug out when we find him like that was just demoralizing.

I also appreciate that you are trying to incorporate fun mechanics into these bosses. The only issue is that the fights are open to anyone who comes along. So what do you do when a second guild shows up that doesn’t know the fight, and starts screwing up your defiance removal on Sotzz or stacking might onto Kamali. I like that these fights are out in the open world, but you really have to make them idiot-bypasser proof in some way.

According to this dungeon forum thread, it is one second.

edit: Scooped by Volcanis!

You do indeed recall correctly. Robert mentioned it in this thread. They intend to add them, I think, but couldn’t manage it for this patch. I’m very much looking forward to that change!

We ran CoF 1 and 2 tonight with the new rules. The changes to Magg’s chain were excellent, in my opinion. An encounter that was cause for groans was more cause for glee now. If the changes there reflect how you’re going to tune things long term, I think it is going to be excellent. There are certain dungeons/paths that I’m a little afraid to tackle with the res changes, but hopefully adjustments will come, waypoints will be added (I’m looking at you, TA), and my guild will figure out some of the tougher encounters. Dungeons are already one of my favorite things in the game, though I am far from hardcore, so I’m looking forward to phase 2.