Showing Posts For Xanthiel.9360:
In increasing the tokens from 30 for the first run and 20 (or was it 25?) for subsequent runs in the same dungeon to 60 for your first 3 runs they have reduced the number of runs you need to do for 180 tokens (the cost of one cheap piece of armor) from 8 (using 25 as the figure for subsequent runs) to 3. There must only be a tiny percentage of the player base who would be willing to run a path more than 8 times a day, especially given that Anet have made the very easy paths harder.
Given the above, this basically means that barring extreme cases you can get the armor as fast as, if not faster than before. A full set of armor with no weapon will be around a week I believe, doing the 3 runs a day.
You have to extend the period players earn rewards over in some manner, dailies and weeklys are the classic example. Think of this like that.
Plus one. We ran out of time when it was midnight last night and we’d been going for 4 hours, but we managed to beat lupicus after a few wipes, and it was as rewarding as finishing the whole dungeon (not in literal terms obviously, but putting him down was sweet). It’s a shame we didn’t have the time to carry on, as we all want our dungeon master, but I honestly don’t mind much because overcoming the challenge became the reward!
It’s not about the economy, it’s about the prestige. I don’t know if you played guild wars 1 or not, but if you did, think about that and what Anet’s gear philosophy was back then, as it hasn’t really changed.
If you didn’t, don’t worry, I am going to explain:
In guild wars 1 the max level was 20, probably taking casually a week, down to a crazy day for the hardcores. At 20 getting max stat items was incredibly easy, probably take you only a day or 2 more to get these. Given this, those who enjoyed the game had to have something to look forward to still, and this came in the form of fancy skins for the armor, some of which took months to get.
Anet have brought that forward, and the dungeon gear is supposed to be the fancy skin, the easy way to get the armor was meant to be crafting or buying it on the TP. Unfortunately, since it was possible to speed run CoF on launch (or at least when you could get a party into the same instance) people went ahead and decided dungeons were the easy way to get the exotics, which is of course the reverse of what was intended.
The point of this is that the dungeon armies were intended wholly to show off, pretty much, and running the easiest path 20 times a day isn’t much to brag about. That’s why the 60 token reward is for doing each path, once per day. Remember they’ve already bent on this, as it used to be 30 was the most you could get each run.
If you can farm a set of armor in a day then nobody is going to look at you and think “wow, he really put the effort in there” which is what I used to think when I saw someone with chaos gloves in gw1 (until a couple years had passed anyway).
Sadly, CoF armor has already lost it’s sheen thanks to it being so heavily farmed, which is a shame as it looks so nice. They’re just playing damage control on the rest.
Sorry for the wall of text btw.
Sometimes he uses his single target attack mid aoe it seems. Not sure if he’s supposed to be able to, or if it is a bug that he can do both at the same time, but I’m fairly sure that’s what it is, it seems to hunt you down in the same way. I know you said it wasn’t that, but why not? The attack is the same, just the animation for the attack is being covered by the aoe animation. Not saying its not annoying/a bit cheap mind.
I found that it was possible to avoid his aoe by getting really rather close to him, I guess he shoots them up before they come back down, as I know you can get hit if you stand in front of the red circles like others have said, but that seems to only apply further away. Of course then you have to get back again sharpish, as you need space to be able to dodge his single target.
As for the resetting on shadow step, it’s obviously a bug. This being said, he seems to focus pretty much exclusively on the person with the highest toughness in his second stage, so if you know who that is in your group it’s probably best that they stay away from the door. Obviously this is just to minimise the change of him bugging out until Anet fix this.
(edited by Xanthiel.9360)
I did 2 explorables last night, CoF path 1, and TA up path.
I was jubilant after finally beating the effigy in CoF, as we have tried a couple of times before with no success, but afterwards we discovered that only the person who entered the dungeon got the achievement! The rest of us didn’t see any cut scenes at all and we believe this is linked.
Same story in TA, though. I don’t mind really in this case, the run was fun, and fairly quick, unlike the effigy one. In TA though, called targets only appeared for the one who called them, which was a bit of a pain.
We got full 60 tokens for both runs, but these do not stack with the pre patch tokens of the same type.
I agree with OP. Also I must point out that people most were likely not “having fun” speed running CoF, they were getting a significant amount of money/exp/gear for an insignificant amount of time spent, and thus felt like they were “winning the game”.
Unless, you know, they enjoyed beating the exact same enemies in the exact same configurations once every 20 minutes ad infinitum. I could swear people used to call that a “grind”…
Explorables ARE hard. I’ll get that out there. They are intended to be. A net has said many times that they intended them for top end players, who are well organised and looking for a challenge. I think they have delivered; you really need to take your time in ex, and learn the mechanics for each one. Cookie cutters might as well just give it up, trying to tank and spank every encounter will just see you dead.
I started running some explorables with some more guildies shortly after my first sm experience. There’s probably about 10 of us who regularly do ex, so we don’t always have the same team, and we often have multiples of the same professions. We don’t use voice chat, but we do discuss why we have failed an encounter before trying it again in party chat. We have one person who calls targets, although sometimes others might if we feel the designated caller has missed something. None of us have full exotic gear, and some of us aren’t even 80, yet we have done the majority of explorables (and by that I mean paths, not just 1 per dungeon). Everyone has had to adapt their play style at one time or another, swapping weapons/traits/armor to deal with specific fights is not uncommon.
A couple of encounters have been truly hellish, but getting through them was that much more satisfying, and I can honestly say that right now explorables are my favorite part of the game.
tl;dr: They’re hard because they are meant to be, and I personally love it.
Finally on the cost of a full set of dungeon gear; why do people even want to get this fast? Remember exotic armor is the top tier, and so essentially what you are getting from your favorite dungeon is both the best gear, AND the skin you like, which should be a badge of honor which has people going “:o that guy is the boss of dungeon x!!!”. Remember getting nice skins and titles is the end game, since it isn’t too hard to stump up the cash to get exotics, and the stats aren’t that much better than rares anyway. Do you really want to get to 80, farm for 2 days, then say “ok, game done”?.
Also, compare doing a few dozen dungeon runs to what you have to do to get a top tier weapon with a prestige skin (a legendary weapon), and give your thanks that Anet doesnt want you to spend 10 years going after armor!
I know I’ve compared gw2 to other mmos (read wow) in the above, and it may seem like I’m dissing it, but I am not. I like wow, it’s the best at what it does, and what it does works and is popular. All I am saying is that gw2 is different, by design, and should be treated as such.
I am also well aware that this will probably end with me receiving a torrent of abuse from people who don’t share my views (its an mmo forum, after all), but I’m cool with that.
I like what you’ve done with dungeons Anet (though maybe a couple of encounters should be tweaked?). Thanks for a great game, and keep up the good work!!!
Recently there have been some posts complaining that the rewards from dungeons are too low now, and suggestions that there should be a single, unified dungeon currency. I agree with the first point, given the increase in difficulty of the easy paths, and whilst I don’t personally like the idea of a single token type for all dungeons, I can see that this idea has some merit.
I’ve also read a lot of posts where people are moaning “I can’t make money any more, because CoF path 2 can’t be facerolled!”, or just generally stating how dungeons are too hard (both story and ex), or pointing out it will take a while to get a full set of armor from a single dungeon.
Firstly, CoF path 2 was waaaaaay too easy to begin with. I actually think Anet waited too long to buff it up, the CoF armor is already seriously common, and wearing it doesn’t show that you’ve achieved anything, only that you know how to move and attack. This is a shame, since the CoF armor DOES look nice, and SHOULD be something you can show off, and feel a kitten wearing. Oh well, too late for that now.
On the second point, IMHO story mode is not hard. I will admit my first ACsm with a pug was a horrific experience… Dem lovers. But I went back a little later with some random guys from my guild, who never played together before, and we finished it with ease, about 5 downs between the lot of us, none of which were me. Ive done most of the other sm’s since, with no one in our party having done them before, and have generally died only once, or not at all. Why did it get so much easier? I was a higher level sure, but not much, and the group was essentially a pug, so either I just got some bad players the first time, or my experience in explorables helped me. Yes, they are harder than world PvE, but once you do a few story modes or explorables you should find that they are really quite easy.
I think many people’s problem with sm may be due to their expectation. In most other mmos you get a pocket healer, and predictable aggro, so if you are dps you can stand around, hitting your rotation and not really worrying about damage (i know it can be harder than that, but remember this is base dungeon difficulty, you really wanna tell me you had to pay max attention in non-heroic 5 man dungeons?). In gw2 you have to be a jack of all trades really, sure you can spec for dps/support/survivability/cc, but you will still have to self heal mainly, step out of melee if you are taking too much dmg, watch out for the tells of dangerous attacks (and learn these, mainly by getting downed by them), rez allies, watch out for aoe circles… the list goes on.
That might seem like a lot, but if you play through a few dungeons you will probably find that you’ve learned it all, almost by accident!
tl;dr: l2p! But I mean that seriously, and not condescendingly. Did you really expect to buy a new game, which actively tries to be different to it’s peers and instantly be good at it?
I need 2 posts for this, please see below