Guild Wars 2

As tips for those who are stuck:

1 – You need the skill against that special magic, it takes like 90% of your HP if not.
2 – Go tanky, your allies will kill while you survive.
3 – Try to clean before you release Caudecus if possible (sometimes you can’t choose as blocking that magic also reduces his barrier bar)
4 – Avoid confronting the jade directly, if you can hit while running do so, if not, be patient and wait for your allies to kill him while you only try to attack when your HP is full and have enough stamina to dodge at least once.
5 – Try to build up some attack, like good DPS skills for when Caudecus is free, so you make the most of it, but again, keeping alive is more important, the npcs also do some damage.
6 – When Caudecus is released and you block the special magic, he immediately knocks you down, try to be ready for it with some dodge or stability (theres some traits that can help).

Even there, I didn’t enjoy that fight, I didnt even fight, running and surviving isn’t the same fighting hard, and that’s mostly what I did. The rest of the dungeon was fine though.

I’m a casual player playing Guild Wars since 2006, as casual that had not yet played this instance until today and took me like an hour and could make it only because I had repair kits with me.

First blame is on me, I didnt expect it to be so difficult so just got into the room without any strategy and just killing as it comes, not cleaning but when I realised it was too much trying to.

Then the JadeArmor appeared and it was death after death, sometimes just on entering as I was pushed to a corner, knocked for a few seconds and died while knocked. Yes, lack of skills some may say, not good game design I say.

I tried adding some stability, but it’s just a waste of time and skills, it’s not possible to have stability for that long, and even when you do, the damage you get from the foes is so high it’s just better to run than to try to use your melee DPS. I use a warrior by the way.

Another reason of my deaths was that special magic skill I had not yet placed into a quick access button and was killing me before I could push the button (clicking with the mouse while running in circles didn’t allow me to do it quick enough), so I set a quick access to it and tried to pay attention.

That sorted, still the jade was impossible, its just too strong, knocks, there’s also other knocks, sometimes you feel like a ping pong ball going from one side of the room to the other. All I could do was run fleeing the jade while trying to hit it time to time only to realize that it also gets invulnerable at times… great.

I ended up changing my zerk armor to my tank one (lucky me I have one), plus regen food, plus regen traits, plus regen sigil. I could handle the damage now as long as I paid attention to that special magic and pushed the button quickly, but still mostly was running away from the jade.

Sometimes that wasn’t enough, as on using the special magic blocker also reduced the bar on Caudecus and would end up with the two of them released… it feels like a storm of knockouts falling upon you and nowhere to cover.

I understand they want to make things a little bit harder and I actually like it, I also understand that they wanted something a bit more epic, but as other times in the past, their way to increase difficulty consists on adding a super-foe level 80.000 or adding a rain of knockouts. And to be honest that’s no fun at all.

To my taste the Jade should be replaced by something else, even if tough at least something not knocking you like there’s no tomorrow. Its just abusing the knocks in the game to make something annoying. And just to make sure you can’t escape: small room. Maybe this would have been different with an ele, as I could just cast areas behind me while running (and heal with water), but with the warrior I have very few areas I can set behind me.

Also, it’s very confusing to know whats going on in the room, as you just run and run to survive but your allies are also attacking sometimes Caudecus has lost a quaerter of it’s life without you knowing how or the jade has been replaced by an elemental you didn’t see coming. So things happen that you don’t even see due to you running for your life and the camera showing little more than what’s just next to you.

Please so that you don’t do more stances like this again Arena Net, please, do not abuse the knocks, we want to enjoy playing, we want some sort of strategy and challenging fight, but knocks and knocks and more knocks isn’t fun.

And to make my point a bit clearer, I’m casual player but been playing for years, I know my main and usually go zerk everywhere without dying, Im a mid-level pvp player and have been in pvp and gvg guilds in the past, even won hoh sometimes in old GW1. So while a bit rusty as Ive played very little the last 8 months still know my way in the game. If it was difficult for me, I dont want to imagine my nephew who just got into the game 2 weeks ago…

I’ve had a few episodes of lag since the game started, mainly on World Events, but nothing that worried me too much though it’s not funny to be unable to play events other people can.

But since a month ago or so I’ve been lagged nearly every day, many people has got lag but I am always one of the firsts on getting it, and as other have done, I check my Internet connection only to see I can download pretty fast (22Mbps) even when the game is fully lagged. My proc is ok, my RAM is ok etc. so it doesn’t seem to be my PC.

The worst of this is watching my friends not lagged at all when I can’t even move my character or, in case I can move it, I can’t use the skills. It seems to be better when I play alone.

I’m connecting from the UK but as I’m Spaniard I normally play with Spanish people in Baruch Bay server. Though for what I read it seems all servers are in the USA it looks weird that my guildmates doesn’t seem to suffer lag as much as I do considering they connect from Spain and I connect from the UK, shouldn’t the UK be better connected to USA than Spain? I’m even considering leaving my 5 years guild to join some UK guild and see if that helps, at least temporarily…

But that doesn’t really seem fun at all. Why ANet doesn’t have any European server? I’m starting to consider to move to another game were you can play from the UK… anyway, anyone knows the servers that seem to work better in the UK? If there’s any…

PD: I’ve been in contact with ANet support yet only to see they make me do all those tests that solve nothing.