First, as someone who plays for a month or two, then takes a break, then comes back…etc, I have noticed that very little seems to be “fixed” between those times. In dungeons, the “meta” is still to bug out, exploit, and overall abuse the system. It’s been the same since day 1. A week ago, I offered my AC group 5g each if they could beat Kholer without stacking. They, all 80’s in exotic/ascended gear who claimed to have run the dungeon a million times, all died on the first big wind-up. I tried my best to help them, to no avail. I was rezing the entire time. This is how long after release, and Anet still has a system where their players still can’t beat the first boss? This right here, dampens my spirits for HoT. They simply can’t design a dungeon that isn’t exploitable and it’s ruined the “dungeon” portion for me.
This is wrong on so many levels that i will not even explain what is wrong with this part.
Second, the “meta” builds. I totally understand them. As a game that was touted as getting rid of the “trinity”, all I can see is that they ended up removing 2 of the 3 pillars in that trinity. It’s all about DPS. If you aren’t 100% dps, your doing it wrong. To make matters worse, this meta has made classes like necromancer almost useless by design and yet there has been no effort put into making a necro relevant outside of WvW zergs.
First, if you are 100% dps you are doing it wrong. Second, whole point of combat system in every game ever made is to kill your target and because of that you need to deal damage. More damage = target dies faster. Third, lack of trinity made all builds in gw2 viable. Necro is a good class in pvp, wvw and pve.
Third, “trains”. The massive events being on a giant timer means all you do is chase one world boss to the next world boss to the next one to the next one…. However, it doesn’t even end there, looking at SW, SW sets up the expansion in my mind as a giant grind. All you do in SW is chase one event to the next. Nothing really feels “important” either. I defend X camp, repair the wall, kill the next wave, repair wall…for what? To grind some more?
World bosses have set spawn timer because devs decided to make megaserver. Not that bad of feature actually. Everyone can just look online for a spawn time and go and kill boss they want without wasting time on waiting for spawn window.
SW is a baaaad map. It was made for people that want to grind nonstop (i would say majority of playerbase since anet uses “metrics” to see what players want) so yeah you fix walls and kill waves to fix more walls and kill move waves. New maps probably follow same design which is horrible but yeah majority wants grind.
Third.5, World boss designs; So, they’ve made “some” progress on this since release (Teq), but overall, the bosses are all basically a giant walltrap that doesn’t “do” anything. Shatterer is the prime example. Since release, Shatterer has been a giant wall trap that Anet didn’t even have the decency to put on a wall. The strategy has always been “stand to his right” and, like any flame trap you’d find in a dungeon, Shatterer can’t do anything to anyone standing to his right. These giant, massive, visually impressive world bosses really don’t do anything, they don’t threaten anyone. Pick a world boss though, and that’s all they are, a wall trap that you have to try to die to…
100% agree with this. Some world bosses need complete rework and i think devs learned what was wrong with old bosses and new ones will be designed better.
But i doubt that they will rework bosses like Shatterer because it was confirmed by the devs that developing new content >reworking old content.
Fourth, “stack here”. Stacking, nothing breaks immersion more than “stack here” tactics. WvW is “stack on commander” dungeons are “stack on the wall”.
Stacking on commander in wvw is perfectly normal and will change only when boon sharing radius will be increased to 1200+ range. And stacking on wall in dungeons is useless (unless you need to los some trash mobs) so that’s l2p problem.
