Guild Wars 2

Take a cue from Team Fortress 2’s crates. Most crates will not be worth the cost of the key, but the small chance at a very distinctive cosmetic item (unusuals) makes them worth opening, and seasonal crates with their own specific keys and typically better reward push the cash store sales through the roof.

I really want to support GW2, I think it’s worth the $15 a month I’d pay for any other MMO, and the gambling element of keys and chests is appealing. I’m ok with knowing it’s /probably/ going to be a net loss in the end, but at least give me hope that I could earn more than what the key was worth with some luck.

Daboris.6730:

You might as well, also, go to WvW at level 1 and state it was the worst experience you ever had and that you are completely outmatched.

Completely unrelated. Apples to oranges. WvW is not meant for level 1 players. AC Story, on the other hand, is intended for level 30 players. Are you saying people should do it at level 80 instead? Because that’s what explorable would be for.

Daboris.6730:

There is no “easing” into dungeons because that’s why story modes are for. That’s why there’s cool looking gear for each dungeon, because each one stays rather difficult. Was SM a pain when I did it at 30? Sure, but I didn’t run to the forums and cry endlessly until they changed it. I sucked it up, leveled, got more skills and game experience, and now do much better.

I don’t even understand what you are going on about. We are talking about story mode right now. And you’re right, there is no easing into dungeons currently, but it doesn’t mean there should not be. There’s this thing called a learning curve, and Ascalon Catacombs completely skips it. You calling everyone who dislikes this perceived flaw in dungeon design crybabies does nothing to help your argument.

If your concern is that retuning AC story would make the gear too easy to obtain, then perhaps it just goes to show the story mode should not be linked to the dungeon gear system so as to remain a mode geared towards experiencing the story and learning dungeon mechanics.

edit:

Suggested level, or minimum required level, doesn’t mean good or best level.

I just had to go back to quote that because seriously, that is dumb. Ascalon Catacombs Story mode is a story dungeon which you are invited to visit along the personal storyline quests, around level 30. It’s not hard to understand. It is meant to be tackled by people who, in all likelihood, have never done a dungeon in GW2 before.

That is the rational way of looking at it. But some people just look at a stupid challenge and say, yes, I am manning the hell up and doing it the way it was intended to be done.

I don’t regret completing it with the bomb. I did it without the bomb once to learn the path, got the achievement, and went back to do it with the bomb. But if I’d left only after getting the achievement, it would have kept bugging me. What if that chest contained a unique item? What if someone was watching and thought I was a kitten? All these doubts, man.

As stated in the original post, I was ok with items being bad. I expected them to be terrible. But not even getting anything, that was just adding insult to injury.

Yeah, Sharkmaw Caverns was sweet. It was bugged for me: the light never flashed in the dark room, so I had to use grenades to light the path for me and someone else I met in there. It was a lot of fun, and one of the only times a bug improved my experience.

A lot of the jumping puzzles are great. Most of them, actually. Just not Griffonrook.

It is a brilliant idea, and also one so obvious we have to wonder why it isn’t already this way.

If you die to fall damage, gear doesn’t get damaged. If you die to a griffon, say you just fell from way high up and a griffon attacks you and blows up your bomb while you’re still immobilized trying to pick your face off the ground, your gear gets damaged.

I’ve heard people say AC Story is the hardest story dungeon. I would like to hear from a dev his reasons for why that makes sense.

They do have repeating value. I go back and complete old jumping puzzles almost every day because I enjoy them and like to see how fast I can make my runs.

Not so for Griffonrook. It’s random, it’s dumb, it smells and I hate it. That everyone, everywhere recommends not taking the bomb and just doing it normally for the achievement really shows that there’s something terribly wrong with this puzzle.

First off, let me say, I love the idea of jumping puzzles. Just yesterday, I was telling a friend that jumping puzzles are the most refreshing addition I’ve seen to the standard MMO formula in years. Finding one on your own, figuring out the traps and jumps, grouping up with people along the way, all makes for a wonderful experience.

With that said, kitten Griffonrook Run. Poorly thought out, poorly executed. I can’t tell you how many times I died mid-jump, between two platforms, because a griffon instantly attacked me without giving me time to even land, let alone dodge. It is aggravating, infuriating, an exercise in frustration rather than skill. I’m not ashamed to say it took me more than an hour to complete it with the bomb. And every other attempt, I had to jump down onto the first platform and kill the griffon guarding the first jump, suicide off a cliff and teleport back up because it was the only way to clear the first jump aside from sheer luck.

I actually had to spec just for this puzzle. I had to change all my utility skills just so I’d be able to do as much as possible while still holding the bomb.

I was fully expecting crap blues. I knew this would be a huge waste of my time. I knew the repair bill would completely overshadow the reward. I was prepared for that and I did not mind because I had started the puzzle and I was going to finish it and never, ever look back. But

THE

CHEST

WAS

EMPTY

I hate hyperbole in forum complaints. I hate, most of all, the expression “a slap in the face”, because approximating frustration in a video game to physical assault sounds childish and entitled. But here, yes, I will go ahead and say, this was a slap in the face. And I’m a firm believer in eye for an eye. Please find whoever designed this and give him a good slap. No need to draw blood or anything like that, you don’t want a lawsuit, just a good firm slap will do.

P.S. I know it’s bugged and I now know you can log out and log back in to make the contents of the chest appear. That doesn’t make Griffonrook any less of an annoyance.

That is good advice. It’s too bad the game doesn’t really hint at this.

Thanks for the input. Yes, the is the gist of the problem. Right now, AC story is our first introduction to proper group play, and it fails at teaching players how to behave in dungeons. This could very well be accomplished with tutorials and better group quests but going only from what is currently in-game, retuning AC Story feels like the least time-consuming solution.

I know there is a rather huge divergence of opinions on the topic of dungeon difficulty, here on these forums. I can understand the veteran players’ desire for a challenge, I tend to seek the same thing in MMOs, but I have seen some perfectly reasonable concerns brushed away with personal accounts of clearing such and such dungeon in 20 minutes with no death, as if that somehow invalidates the frustration lived by other players.

I do believe that, as time goes by and people get accustomed with their classes’ tools and utilities, better learn group mechanics and get to know every nook and cranny of every dungeon perfectly, places like AC Story will become a lot more manageable.

This is not what it is about. AC Story is not an end-game instance to be done over and over again. It is the first dungeon, an important part of the story, in a game where everything up to that exact point has been either trivial in difficulty, or a mindless zerg-fest when it comes to events. The learning curve is out of whack, and this dungeon expects too much of people. I’m going to point to the Lovers as an encounter that is mechanically overwhelming and too unforgiving for a group of newbies just putting foot in a dungeon with a PUG for the first time. We went through it on my first time in AC using the aggravating method of graveyard zerging. And there’s no fun in that.

We weren’t in it for the loot, or experience, or challenge, we wanted to experience a dungeon and learn another important facet of the story. It should give the players a desire for more such experiences, and push them to attempt the harder difficulty of explorable. At this task, AC story completely fails. Most players come out of their first run, not thinking that they want more, but rather thanking the heavens that this ordeal is over.

Before the ad hominems start flowing, I’ll say in passing that I have raided in other MMOs, and even led my own raid in WoW that went on to kill Arthas (though that is not a huge achievement considering the low difficulty of that given expansion). Others will say I just want AC Story to be made easy. Well, uh… yes. That is exactly what should be done, in my opinion. There is no harm in making Story mode easy. Explorable can remain at its current difficulty. But as it stands, the easiest mode of the first dungeon encountered feels enough like an unfair challenge that it turns people away from dungeons. It causes a lot of undue aggravation, and fails at its basic task of introducing group mechanics and basic dungeoneering strategies in a way that is not completely overwhelming.

Rant over. Thoughts?