Guild Wars 2

Remember that lots of casual players are still kinda bad at avoiding AoE in dungeons, surviving against dungeon bosses in a more general case, and bad at avoiding Lieutenant’s pull skill.
Also remember that AC and following dungeons are designed to give challenging content to players without having to reach lvl80+max stuff before having fun in dungeons. As a result, there are, of course, easier when you are lvl80 with all traits and max stuff.
Last, remember that a first run will always be more challenging. Just because you don’t know the place, the strategy, how to avoid being OS by each boss … Whatever Anet could do, the difficulty will always decrease with the number of times you will clear a given dungeon path. I remember Thunderhead keep in GW1, everyone had a very hard time when first going through that mission. And everyone could do it semi-afk with heroes after some years (even if it was still hard for beginners, at least before they made each profession too powerfull).

And as a players who played enough by now to be well trained against above threats (I’m often the last survivor in a boss room after 2-4 people in my team are dead), I still see challenge in those dungeons. One part because I don’t play with overtrained players only, but with guild teams (so they die, not everything is easy, and I have to survive so prevent reset. Note : they are not bad players, just not very skilled and not very trained yet) of 5 random profession (so we don’t just build some kind of “sc” teams that is the most efficient in a given dungeon – for example last days we have done paths 1 and 3 in AC, and had a hard time killing the sepulturian nests before the npc/collectors die).
One part because some dungeons are still not easy even with max stuff and lvl80 (ok, I didn’t try them with a full nolife team). For example
- AC path 1 & 3 if you don’t have a team with big raw dmg output.
- Some parts of SE (especially path1 which became impossible when waves of grenadiers were updated to spawn every 30 seconds and didn’t just stop after 10 minutes anymore – I may be wrong, this has been updated again and I didn’t try after last update)
- CoF path3 needs good coordination and players that are capable of fighting 3-5 monsters alone (it’s ok for trained players with max stuff, it is hard if the team contains casual players)
- CoE has subject alpha, which kills easily the players that are not trained to avoid AoE. And surviving alone while they come back is a challenge.
- Arah … contains that Lupicus which we just couldn’t defeat with my guild. Ok, only 2 tries long ago, probably not everyone with full exotic stuff, probably 2-3 players bad at avoiding poison… and couldn’t try again because Arah is perma-blocked on our server. But still, this is a very challenging boss and I doubt that just having a full team of trained/exotic stuffed players will be enough to beat him easily. (and again, even if the team was not perfect, the players were not complete noobs, they had gone through all other dungeons at first try)

So, as a conclusion : YES, many of us like challenging content, YES the new dungeons that will offer a new challenge each time will be a great thing, but NO, they shouldn’t make all dungeons harder. Because we don’t want to make them too hard for half+ of players, and because most of them have a fair amount of difficulty as long as you don’t build a “sc” team (with some exceptions, for exemple CoF path 1, which end boss was nerfed directly from “impossibru” to “what is this joke ?”)

Hi,

There is a big issue with Arah : it can be contested. Not that contestable dungeons are a bad thing, but Arah is special : you need hours of events to uncontest it (20-30 mins max for other contestable dungeons -> ok) ! (worse : this dungeon is part of personal story)
So ? In a general case, do we have to take a day off work each time we want to go in Arah, just in case it is contested and we need to do the long event chain ?

Other issue #1 with this blocking long chain of events : it increases the probability of one of them being blocked. For example on Vabbi, I can’t remember the last time when the dungeon was accessible. Currently “See the pact crash survivors safely to meddler’s summit” is bugged on Vabbi. No matter what we do, no one can enter Arah until next game update.

Other issue #2 with this blocking long chain of events : a recent update made the event to keep the dungeon door more difficlut. Why ? I seriously don’t understand. Did some people exploit ? Please just ben exploiters and don’t punish all honest players out there. The result is that, on a medium populated server (and European : we don’t have people 24/24 everywhere, since euro servers are only euro and american servers are worldwide), the dungeon will become contested again very fast. Which brings us back to the chain event issue : either way too long for a group that wants to spend an evening in Arah, or simply blocked by a bug.

I don’t know what would be the best change for this, but I do know that this needs a change. Anet, please do something so that medium populated servers don’t have perma-blocked dungeons anymore ! :-)

Regards,

Eowyn

done with all characters :
- silvari Elementalist, Thief, Ranger and Mesmer
- human Mesmer, Ranger, Warrior
- Norn Necromant, Guardian, Engineer

Didn’t use any speed boosts : they are not a good idea since many jumps have the exact length to be done easily while running at normal speed. Using speed boosts would require more precise jumps and make it harder.

Completed it around 50 other times with my Silvari Ranger and my Human Mesmer (main characters atm)

GummiBear.2756:

making a /stuck would be far the easier than making blink work underwater I think, since blink is ground targeted, how would you decide on the altitude to us it on?

I know that, here is what I was thinking about : make us usable FROM underwater, but only TO solid ground (or target the ground/walls even if we are in water, so if we use it from water to water we can just teleport to the bottom/walls)

Had the same issue a lot of times. Every time there is some water under the map, so I’m blocked in water (sometimes even behind the walls of a river !)
I agree that this is really annoying when you have to restart a story, pay for a waypoint (that are too expansive, I probably totalized 50 silver because of the bug). The worst is when you where fighting a champion alone and you get stuck under the map at 95% of the event, and the boss resets, but you are still considered as in a fight so you can’t even use a waypoint !

Here is a workaround : use the skill Blink to a correct position.
Limit of this workaround : that skill can’t be used from underwater. You will have to find a way of getting out of water, which is often impossible (when it is possible, you can get out of water under a hill, and use Blink to teleport through that hill)

To Anet, how to solve this easily : the bug itself if probably a tricky one that needs some reworking of the graphic engine, so I don’t expect it to be solved for the next update. So, you could implement a simple workaround in the meantime : make Blink usable from under the water. Please do it, it’s not a pretty way of debugging but it will really help players until the bug itself can be solved for good.
Another solution would be to re-implement the command /stuck that was in GW1. This would also be useful when we fall in some little places which can’t be jumped out from.

When anet says in an update something like “Reduced difficulty” or “Adjusted difficulty”, it actually means that something that what hard becomes … nothing at all, npcs can do it alone.
I’ve done the battle or fort trinity some days ago with my mesmer, having done it long ago with my ranger. The first time it was hard. The second time I could as well let npcs do everything except closing the doors … .
I’ve tried to do The Source of Orr today (“tried” because a bug prevents the cutscene from triggering after the boss death), it’s the same : the boss has so low HP, I only use the first skill of my staff so that he doesn’t die too fast (I love this quest, I hate how they made it SO short !). Once again, NPC (Traherne in this case) could probably finish the quest alone.
Last example : I’ve once tried to finish the path of Citadel of Flames where the final boss used cristals, and we had to stop because nothing could kill the cristals fast enough (and we’re not bad). When they “adjusted difficulty”, we went back there, only to find an utterly nerfed boss that doesn’t deal much damage, and can easily be killed without even bothering about the cristals !!

Conclution : Anet, please, please, try to strike a balance between the initial difficulty of the hard things you adjust, and a completely ruined difficulty …

edit : note that the examples here are only examples, many other difficulty adjustments are way too heavy.

+1
If players use exploits in dungeon, finding a way of closing the exploit without degrading the game experience for players who don’t exploit should always be the first solution.
Note that waypoints in dungeons probably need a full review. In some of them there are too many waypoints (caudecus ?), and in some we have to run for a way too long time which can’t even be justified by the need to prevent people from coming back to bosses too fast after death (twilight arbor ?)

Hi,

I’m here to talk about Twilight Arbor update. You made things harder. According to many players, it was one of the hardest dungeons in GW2, and according to myself it wasn’t that hard, but was fairly hard, just cool.
I really don’t understand WHY you decided to make it harder.

- increase the range of the up path end boss —> I’m completely OK with that. I have done that path once (as I have done each path once before update), and I agree that being able to stay at entrance of the room and hit the boss without being hit was not a good thing for an end-boss.

but

- adding very long grasps during the forward->forward path end boss fight ?! Ok it may have been a little too easy to keep running around the boss and dodging his minions, but now the difficulty is much higher. Too high. As a ranger I could dodge a lot and survive, but my teammates (who are pretty good compared to the medium level of GW2 players) would end up dead. Since the waypoint is very far and they had to kill those horrible little things on the way, I was dead before they could come back.
To my mind, the idea of grasping is OK. But something needs to be done to make it doable by a random team (random = not a fixed team of 5 precise professions just like in gw1’s SC).
Examples : (1) make graps shorter, (2) add a waypoint closer to the end boss (note : another waypoint in the dungeon would be cool too), (3) lower the number of those poison things and their respawn rate (note that some people can’t kill them, some bug will say “not in sight” even if they are nearly in melee range), (4) change the boss so that it doesn’t regain his life when players are dead.
Note to players reading this : I KNOW that the boss is killable in its current state, I’m just giving an opinion and ideas to make it more balanced.
Note2 : we were able to kill it … after killing 2 veteran things. For some reason, 3 other didn’t agro again while we were hitting the boss from the entrance of the room, and the 2 that we killed didn’t respawn. It was probably a bug, we were lucky (as long a we can call luck the fact of killing that boss after that many deaths)

- Spiders : the update text isn’t very clear, I assume that ‘nightmare tree spider path’ is the forward->up path. I have done that path once before update, and I think that the boss was well balanced. I may have misunderstood the update (didn’t go through that path today), but if it’s another difficulty increase, it’s a bad idea

And last : I just read a thread of a player bragging about finishing this dungeon alone with an elementalist, most obviously after using some exploits. I sincerely hope that this isn’t the reason why you made this dungeon harder. On the one hand because exploits have to be closed and exploiters banned (as long as exploit is dangerous: I don’t think that this player doing a dungeon in 3 hours should be banned …), on the other hand because there will always be skilled players able to do things with a reduced team (1-4 instead of 5) and this is not a reason to make them harder for everyone else.

Until today I loved everything about gw2, and now I’ve never felt that bad in a dungeon (even when encountering the giganticus lupicus bug). I really hope that something will be changed, because I really liked that dungeon and now I had to decide not to go in it anymore (and I need its token badly ^^)

Thank you for reading this, I hope I didn’t seem too mean, cause I’m not.

Regards,

Eowyn

Hi

Demanding to fire the guy who designed a dungeon because you find it too hard … I think that YOU are the one who is not sane. (and all players in that thread that agree on the idea that people who made gw2 should be fired, are completely stupid too. This is a great game, and some imperfections in it – especially after 1 month – are not a reason to fire anyone !)

As for this boss difficulty, I agree that it is a bit too high, AND there is a bug. We tried it with my guild, and after several tries we found a good technique to finish the first part and prevent him from eating any worm. After some more tries, we were doing good with the second part (AoE part). But here an ugly bug happened : the boss reset to full HP instantly even if there were 3 of us fighting (and 2 of us coming back from death). Because of that bug we had to give up after some wasted hours ;(. I also said that the difficulty is a bit too high because players who were able to finish it without encountering the bug said that after some time, the AoE become way more powerful, which as far as I’m concerned should not happen since the difficulty is already high enough.

Regards,

Eowyn

Until Anet implements such a tool, you can use gw2organizer.com the more people use it, the easier it will be to find teams.

Hi,

We tried to do this dungeon path tonight with my guild. It turned out to be completely impossible for us.
Team :
- 4 Rangers
- 1 Warrior
- Teamspeak for 4 of us (the 4th ranger being a stranger)

We tried to kill the crystals first, we tried to use different pets including Hyena that can invocate another hyena. But no matter what we would do, crystals were way too numerous and repoped too fast. Even if we were sometimes able to kill them all, they would come back before we could really damage the boss.
We also used Pink Moas in an attempt to interrupt the boss when casting new crystals, but it didn’t work.

We found out that the boss didn’t have an move distance limit, so we lured him through the dungeon, hoping to get him far from the crystals. But he kept invocating them around him.
We lured him through the whole dungeon, the 2 following didn’t work :
- having him step in the middle of a long bridge and shout “YOU SHALL NOT PASS”.
- luring him to the beginning of the dungeon (this took us a huge amount of time since he doesn’t just run to us) and having him agro all those NPCs that were there. NPCs died incredibly fast. Second group of NPCs after the prisonner (prisonners didn’t fight) died fast too.
Second bridge after the NPCs didn’t break either when shouting “YOU SHALL NOT PASS” even if that boss has some shadow and flame like a Balrog ^^.

On the way though the dungeon, the boss sometimes got stuck (in the rock on the right before the door before the 1st NPC group – counted as 1st when coming from the end of the dungeon). He stoped casting Crystals , and we were able to kill 7-8% of him, but he went out of the rocks each time we attacked him in melee (bows couldn’t be use through the wall)

Most obviously this is either undoable, or requires spacial team lineups. In any case, it can’t be done with a random team (in our case 4R 1W, but previous message show that other random teams failed)

The concept of this boss seems very cool, but is completely spoiled by the unbalanced state of it. Please do something, like having crystal repop slower, or less numerous, or even don’t repop.

Note that we are the most unlucky guild : when we tried 2nd way in Ascalon Catacombs the last boss cas bugged and didn’t spawn (not even the ghosts that we would have had to kill while the NPC would have repaired the weapons – if I remember well what I have done during 2nd BWE). When we tried honor of the wawes (don’t remember path number), the last boss didn’t pop and the ground in his room was immaterial (killing the totems from under the water under the ground didn’t pop the boss). And we also failed another path in AC (not bug this time) because we didn’t have the right team lineup (had to kill nests to protect asura devices but our lineup couldn’t kill them fast enough).

I made some screens
http://images.gw2organizer.com/screens/gw012.jpg
The 1st bridge, where I shot “you shall not pass” when the boss was on it some minutes after I took screenshot (ok we knew that it wouldn’t work but trying was fun^^)

http://images.gw2organizer.com/screens/gw013.jpg
The wall in which the boss got sometimes stuck.

http://images.gw2organizer.com/screens/gw014.jpg
The room cleaned off all those poor NPCs. (and a beautiful screenshot with all those crystals in middle of the lava room)

http://images.gw2organizer.com/screens/gw015.jpg
The second bridge, that didn’t obey to Gandalf either.

Once again, I really like the concept, please just rebalance it

Regards,

Eowyn

Hi,

I ran into several blocked events and skill challenges over the last few days, which are still bugged even after they are fixed according to update notes.
Being a CS Engineer, I figured out a solution that could benefit both players and developers, even if it is not a final solution (of course, I can’t see the game code).

Events/challenges/personal stories/… can probably be blocked by lots of causes, and probably very complicated game mechanics. In any case, fixing the most common causes will not prevent all block issues in the future, there will probably ever be some complicated factor coincidences that will block events.

My idea is the following : an auto reset of events that are blocked.
why? Even fixing the real cause is the best, it will unlock events for player faster, and let developers focus on the cause without the pressure. And it will be good for all the rare complicated block cases that my occur over the next years.

how? Detecting the block itself is probably hard. My idea is the following : log the last datetime when a player completes something (event, challenge). Have a batch run every 5 minutes and, for each event/challenge, compare the last completion date with the current date, and a timeout to be defined for each of them (for example 20 minutes for skill challenges, 2-3 hours for big, long events like Lyssa temple). If (current time > last completion time + timeout), just reset the event/challange like it has probably be done in the last update.

With that new mechanism, players will only have to wait for timeout+batch time, and devs will be able to take their time to fix the real cause, knowing that the reset batch makes players able to play.

I hope that this is a good enough idea and will help

Regards,

Eowyn

ps : I’m just trying to help making the game better, I know that Anet devs are probably more experienced than me. Just thinking that they may have missed the above solution in the pressure/hassle of all those little things that have to be fixed post-release.
pps : I hope that my english is good enough to make my explanations clear.