Guild Wars 2

Please reconsider adding more vendor tabs to the Black Lion Specialist to keep all sets available, they are staying in the game data anyways.

Praise the Sun !

April 31st patch still didn’t adress the challenge mote issue in “Meeting the Asura”

Same here last achievement left, but no mote showing up, totally blocks my fun of completing this chapter and the last part of the armor set.(((
Super anticlimactic progress blocker really needs attention urgently!

…continued from previous post

Finally the gauntlet also has some kind of unneccessary Gear-check. This is mostly because of the very limited arena time. Depending on opponent your class strategy and so on, your actual gear will make significant difference.
While I think making people reconsider their class builds and strategies is a good L2P challenge feature, it is NOT any fun introducing gear checks. While making it possible to factor in gear into your strategy is fun, it is NOT fun to simply make certain gear almost not viable. This is especially true for DPS-checking with time limits !
Designers should consider when making encounters with timers, that mechanics and/or timer length will somewhat make sure the time limit does not make it a DPS/gear-check.
Although we have unfortunatly seen these timer/DPS/gear-check introduced once and again in GW2.
A good sample for an encounter with a timed phase check that does NOT check gear/DPS would be the frozen phase in the Blob-Fight of the Ahn’Qiraj-Raid.
This phase does not check gear or DPS, instead it checks whether everyone in the Raid has learned to play and can actually whip out a basic melee damage weapon an auto-attack the thing often enough within the time limit. While that sounds just too silly for a mechanic, it actually has made a surprisingly large amount of raid groups fail, illustrating how deceiving beating other gear-check encounters can be concerning determining your personal state in the actual L2P game.

While the essence of your elaborations is true, that is that the gauntlet is a good idea to introduce some exciting L2P to the game, you are painting some details far too positively.

First of all, the whole game is L2P and that is what makes it a lot better than all the other lame-kitten gear-grind-dps-check MMOs out there. Especially because it has a so very well made learning curve, so that it is exciting to learn for players of very distinct level of learning capability. And the Gauntlet is the high end up the learning curve of the game.

On the other hand the gauntlet has some major issues, making it in many aspects not L2P but something else.

First of all there is a major technical issue with this. Last year we all kinds of problems with player hardware/ISP-quality checking by super-mega-zergs trampling down your FPS/lagging you out by just passing below your arena cage. While the FPS issue does not seem to be around this time, really bad lag spikes eventually occur for unknown reason.
Another really unfortunate technical detail is the blinding overbright effect. While I personally believe this one of Liadri’s move is pretty cheap artificial difficulty and totally uneeded to start with, there is this silly issue that it will really kill people already struggling with hardware limitations. On the other hand every player can just opt to simply switch this effect off by going to the graphics options and turn off “post-processing” effects. Messing with the game client config MUST never change game difficulty whatsoever !! Either take it out or make it work on minimal hardware similarly.
Also not all the arenas are created equally, especially the white whirls make it obvious, while in some arenas you can easily stand between the whirls close to the edge of the arena and the actual arena wall and have ample space to maneuver, in other arenas these whirls do clip with the arena boundary, so can’t stand behind when luring shades to it.
Finally the camera. While definitely it was a good choice to take out the visible dome ceiling, this does not fix the camera while inside the arena. The camera will still collide with the plethora of invisible walls encompassing the arena to keep outsiders from interacting. Though that would have been some kind of fun, if the crowd could help, yet I know this would defeat the idea of the 1 vs Boss arena.

Some things also are not actually L2P, but simple memorization.
For example in Liadri fight the pattern for Shadowfall and the bright twirls seems to be a totally static arrangement. Which I consider somewhat unfortunate from a challenge point of view. Phase 1 thus goes into learning one stupid pattern, instead of learning the machanic of a boss move and work out a plan to work with it dynamically. Therefore we now see almost any class with almost any strategy doing Phase 1 almost the same way, if they know what they are doing, because there simply is one fastest route to get 3 lights on her to advance to P2.

Also the fights are not a realiably identical as some here stated.
For example in the Liadri fight, the Cosmic orbs do not follow a realiable pattern. They may spawn very favorable for you or simply void your chance.
So while the other part of the fight seems to be made as a game of memory, this part can hit you like a lottery. Orbs may save you after doing something bad and orbs may also void all you successful and skillful play, if they spawn in an unfortunate moment at an unfortunate location, you won’t know. Keep fingers crossed, you won’t get caught in a situation where the orb spawn leaves you with no option.
There are situations where an orb can leave you with this:
1) Cannot kill orb becaus it is out of reach.
2) Pulled by orb will down you, but you won’t get a chance to rally because a shade is already nearby.
That would be RNG, not L2P.

tbc.. nect post, because of post length limit

FearedbytheGods.8617:

Inverse.2967:

pic below

Where’s your title

Right there, just for you … don’t tell anybody

After burning through some of my leftover tickets from last time beating Liadri up, I eventually managed to beat her with a silly engineer heal bomb build which I used for stomping over Subject 7 in the days.

Bombs for healing plus rifle for a bit of range when needed and to bring down distant orbs quickly. Maintenance Oil + Omnonberry Pie up. Full celestial gear with runes of lyssa, yes the all-stats one that every one considers inferior.
Looks like you won’t need insane damage gear or build this time around.

Yet Liadri fight still kills players far too often due to bad controls, bad camera and overall bad luck with random orb spawns, which makes this fight only partly skill based, you also need a bit of luck.

Build in pic below for those engineers interested.

Scarlet actually is Tiny Tina now playing Guild Wars 2

Best story part so far ! Kuh-Rox !

Pleaser just take a look at one single non debatable aspect of queen’s gauntlet fight:

They all come with “enrage timer”, dropping you down through the floor is a even a rather harsh enrage I’d say.
Actually, that does not make anything more challenging or harder, it is just a cheapskate optimize check, this typically refers also to the well known “gear check”, Zerker anyone ?
And as you can see with the many posts around, people don’t just have probs because they are still looking for a good tactic or trait setup… no they can do everything top, just to get flushed down the toilet for not bringing max exotic zerk/condi/tank/dodge gear at 2% boss health on an otherwise well played almost perfect round.

To me this design resembles greatly the poor and I had hoped overcome unfun design decisions formerly made for typical gear-up-check-time-gating-brickwall raid area content of so many other games.
Guildwars 2 should not dip into those waters.. actually most players probably bought it because the basic concept was not about this old cheap pseudo-hard-mode again.
Acutally look a Liadri: Her moves are actually not hard at all, you could learn to play them in your sleep… if you weren’t under constant doom of being killed by magic pixels, slight lag differences, controls/camera that are sub-par for some parts of the encounter’s mechanics/movement or right out bad luck of being dunken by silly bugs, cheap enrage timer/gear, bad RNG on the projectile evading-wobbling-left-right-left-right or just draw a straight loose bad orb placement at rather disappointing unforeseen moment.

GG
Actually the concept of the gauntlet is fantastic.. but as stated above, the execution thus is all the more disappointing.

Yes !
Just did it for both with my Sigil/Zerker-Warrior using Bow/Rifle, replaced one sigil with the bolas for another pin-down.
I only CCed and focused the plunderers, some potshots to keep adrenalin at max, so i could often one-shot them with rifle burst skill.

Actually the path end boss is still beatable with the ancient range/dodge/spider-kill tactic.
Contrary to my expectation we just did it this way, though it took a kitten long time and was painfully hard.

Yet I do agree with the many complaints about this encounter’s balance, since we only could do it because our class composition/character’s setup were in favour of this strategy and we had 5 very coordinated player on TS. This fight in its current state simply is no fun for the majority of players, so fix it to be fun for most players again.

FYI, if you like to try and replicate this:
1 Warrior, heavy onn support
1 Guardian, full bunker/support/healgear
3 BÄMBÄMBÄM Elementalists

Elementalists were range-damaging Boss whenever feasible, otherwise help out bombing spider spawnlings sneaking up to the group
Warrior and Guardian were blocking/reflecting crushing spiders in melee whole time and popping group support/heals/walls/bubbles/signs you know it.

Even though I really enjoyed this fight with this tactic in this select group, i think the boss i no fun in general.. totally overtuned.
The other known working strategy with the Melee-Refelct-Chain-Balling is rather a turnoff of another example that mechanic skipping is more fun than playing the actual over-tuned boss-fight mechanic.
Needs to be retuned.