Yeah, there’s a few bugs I was grappling with that we thought got fixed – there something weird with the FPS that seems to have to do with shaders (investigating), but aside from that the only issues I’m seeing are with Detha and the Ghost Eater. We were seeing some of the same problems with the traps, and I was fixing them as much as I could – but it seems I didn’t fix them up good enough. her getting stuck and the traps sometimes not firing are known things – try leading GE out of the trap and then back into it – that might help for the time being.
And… well… Detha is Detha, lol. I’ve been at it trying to fix her, but the issue where she doesn’t start rebuilding the traps isn’t 100%, and we’ve not been able to get a solid repro.
As for things players feel the spy kits were necessarily to get through, we’re watching the feedback and will make sure to give them some extra QA attention to ensure they are in line with what we want players to experience.
All new stuff in dungeons is going to be hard for the first few days. We see it all the time with new content – people fail and get knocked down when they aren’t used to that sort of thing, and they claim it is too difficult.
Give it a week or so for everyone to develop strategies, learn encounters, and build fundamentals, and they will claim it is too easy. Trust me when I say this, the numbers are punishing (but less than they were before), but knowing the mechanics will greatly mitigate the danger.
For those upset about the changes I made to Food items that life steal on crit, and the spy kit, here’s some words:
Spy Kits: permanent stealth at the cost of karma isn’t good. It’s practically exploitative since it’s a pay-karma-to-win scenario, and it needed to change. We test all of our dungeon content without the use of external items to make sure it is all capable of being completed. This has led though, to a recent surge in players using items from the open world in dungeons to trivialize content or outright break bosses designed to present a specific challenge to a five man group.
Food item life steal on crit Cooldown: The best heal in the game can’t be 100 blades or other similar attacks. If you want to play a glass cannon, there should be danger involved, and the food buff mitigated the danger and allowed glass cannons to stand and trade blows without having to utilize their own heals or dodge rolls. They could just stand still and win – and that’s not the type of dynamic combat we want for our game. We test our content without the food buffs to ensure they are capable to players without access to them, and make sure the balance is good enough for players who don’t have those buffs. There are a lot of other viable food buffs in the game, and this one food buff meant a core few items were dominating all the others.
For those also thinking I went rogue and did this, I went through all the checks and balances, and discussed the changes with leads. While I do have the power to change dungeons, things that affect the world outside of dungeons is handled through meetings to make sure everyone is on board with a proposed solution.
The mobs in Howling King fight really aren’t much of a problem either. If you pull them into the flame circles that appear on the ground they die almost instantly.
They should die instantly. That is the power of the flame scepters! Hodgins sure is useful isn’t he?
Hmm, that seems like a bug. It was intended that you could interrupt the howl that caused the rocks to fall. I’ll send that over to our QA and get it verified.
I think this was needed but kitten there’s got to be better ways to fix a boss than just number tweaking.
There is, but it takes time and resources that we allocated to Catacombs to work on those bosses.
I have ideas for Simin… like the one as follows if we keep the stealth mechanic and don’t change her much:
When she stealths, players have X seconds to get the 5 sparks to their slots around the statue. If she gets knocked out of stealth before that, she regains no health. If players fail the mechanic, she heals to full. The cooldown on the skill can be adjusted based on failure/success, and other things like a PBAOE petrification can be used to punish players for not suceeding with the mechanic. Just spitballing here, but yeah, there’s more than can be done. Just didn’t have the time to tinker with it.
It basically means you can’t abuse them by doing something like 100b or BF and get all your health back via Omnomghost or what have you. I agree completely with 1 second being just right.
Yeah pretty much. Stacking 3 mobs and 100B pretty much meant you were invincible. The same could be said for any class that could stack and AOE a spot rapidly over a short period.
My ranger’s penetrating arrows while using a shortbow was incredibly OP, considering I could heal 1k a second on average just by hitting multiple dudes. Running that and troll unguent for a heal meant I could just stand still and not die.
What is the new internal cooldown to life stealing foods? This change affects many builds that rely on it and it would be nice to know a # instead of just a mystery number you guys like to give out, thanks.
There are builds that rely on food?
Yes, there are. Many of the glass cannon builds rely on the food buffs for lifesteal that is greater than healing. I added a 1 second cooldown after each proc to stop abuse using certain skills that could heal a character from near death to full health due purely to critting with a food item.
Was sad to see no mention of any spy kit nerfs in the patch notes, I suppose the stealth changes mentioned could be there to address this…would be a bit silly to break the crystals from caledon forest but leave spy kits.
Great catch – I did in fact do something to spy kits (both OOW and Ash Legion) that got dropped out of the patch notes by accident (Stealth stealth nerf!). I’ll go make sure they are properly put into the patch notes.
Subject Alpha is a tough cooky for sure. We have some cool plans for him in the future. When we are looking at bosses our intent is not to nerf them – but to make them a more enjoyable experience while keeping up with the challenge that we want our explorable dungeons to be.
One of the more interesting concepts I have for Subject Alpha is that every encounter with him is different, and that he has a wide array of abilities that he selects from before each fight randomly, resulting in a lot of dynamic play, and resulting in subject Alpha having tons of possible builds that he could randomly select from or morph into as the fight progresses.
You might also want to keep in mind that the February monthly reward required every player to play five dungeons to complete it, so make sure to take your February statistics and subtract out five runs per character before comparing them to previous months.
I laughed when I read this. I will be deeply surprised if this is how it turns out. Pleasantly surprised, but deeply surprised nonetheless. This is not what I would bet. My bet would be that what will happen, instead, is that outside of a few exceptional guilds, new people simply won’t be welcome on dungeon teams at all. What your theory leaves out, what this design leaves out, is any in-band, in-game way for players who start out with average skill or below to learn what the alternative to rez-rushing is.
Guilds that (a) have figured it out and (b) have exceptionally patient teachers, people who are willing to have it take a lot longer to get to the reward chest because they have to stop to type, including answering questions, before each fight, will work out the way that you think it will. My experience with MMOs tells me that such teachers are so rare that there will never been enough of them to go around, that not 1 player in 20 will ever get to play alongside one.
You will be deeply surprised. I’m currently trying to get permission to expose some of our internal data regarding our anti res rushing patch – you know, some before and after data where people can look at the numbers. Posting numbers is the tricky bit, but from what we have seen and can correlate from the data, more people are playing dungeons, and less people are dying. There’s more really interesting information that I won’t go into at the moment, but our data suggests that there is an overall positive affect from the patch that is measurable.
A much nicer way to have handled the “res-rushing” issue could’ve been by scaling the reward the boss gives (ex: give more pouches containing coins/tokens/karma or extra tokens or rarer items in reward chest, etc. for beating it without using the WP)
That doesn’t solve the problem though. It’s an interesting reward mechanic, but the problem persists that players wouldn’t have to learn the content or how to play it – they could just ruin their armor res rushing and having a miserable time of it in order to complete it. By forcing players to learn how to do things and cooperate as a group, we’re encouraging them to get better and as a result die less. If players are getting better and dying less, there will be less prejudice towards PuGs, since the general skill level of the dungeon running population has increased.
A comment above mentioned how our QA runs things in the best gear, and has some other false statements in it. Our QA run dungeons and test bosses with multiple characters using different gear combinations/levels, and characters who are both level 80 and the dungeon’s base level. As well, we have people throughout the company of varying player skill testing these things before they get pushed out/patched in. After all that, it has to be signed off by design leads who also play it… so there is plenty of balancing and work done on a boss prior to its release into the wild.
dat feedback…. I’m gonna have to look into that one…
Great job though – that’s some pretty quick time.
Edit: “looking into” things doesn’t mean I’m going to do something about it – just look into it and make sure it is desired functionality. Thanks for the PMs folks.
If I recall correctly, HoTW and CoE don’t send invites when you beat them, you get them after you have done Arah story mode. It’s been a while since I built that mailing system though, but I recall that the 80 dungeons don’t send out explorable invitations until you beat Arah story.
Its very group comp dependent. I’ve been with tanky groups who take a while but never go down or have a problem getting back up, and I’ve done it with glass cannon groups who go down frequently but burn him faster.
I think the better metric would be how efficient a group is, but I don’t mind any time for the most part as long as the group play is solid throughout the entire experience.
OR, you could give us an in-game interface that satisfies the same functions as GW2LFG, so we don’t have to rely on an external website to help match players and groups together.
You know, like your competition offers. Seriously, why promote an external website when this kind of functionality should really be included standard in modern MMOs? Why hasn’t it happened yet?
Why can’t you just let the matter be, fight the boss with 4 people, most likely defeat him and carry on.
Or, even better, kick him, and invite somebody else to join you
I don’t much appreciate being used in such a way, and find the behavior rude to just shuffle the responsibility off on someone else while sitting on the sideline making other people carry the load. Especially when you’re fighting a boss who has an enrage mechanic at lower health, increasing his difficulty.
Typically we do end up kicking the person and restarting the final boss, and completing it. I’ve been kicked as well for not participating when people do those things, and that’s fine – that’s their choice, and they got the votes. It could have been a premade group with the intention of doing that, and I was just the fifth man who wasn’t informed. Just dust myself off and move on.
Point being, if you don’t like the behavior, don’t support it. I don’t foresee us being able to stop the behavior from a developer perspective, but I’m a designer and not a coder.
EDIT
They’re not going to be able to catch everything. It’s the nature of software testing, even my software testing professor has taught me that. The content was probably a lot more bugged before its current state. It can only get better with more iterations, when people spot something that was not caught before.
I think it’s also important to note that we learn from our mistakes and try to pay extra attention to things that have been exploited when we build new content. Our testing pass and development of salvageable crafted items will certainly get a bit more attention for all our new content being built as a result.
Mistakes happen, but I’ve always held the ideal that you only truly fail at something if you keep making the same mistake over and over.
Nope! RNG is RNG. No special character flags for loot. Nothing loot related was changed with maintenance, but that never stops people from making these posts after every single maintenance about it.
Is switching to an alt at the end of a dungeon an exploit?
currently no – it’s just rude if you don’t tell your party first and act as dead weight in the final fight. People do it to level up their lower characters, because it’s a big burst of exp for dungeon completion.
This has happened to me a few times when playing, and usually from someone who doesn’t tell the party, and swap characters at like 25% boss HP. They bring in some level 20 character and stand off to the side while the 4 of us fight a boss. I typically respond by not fighting and just standing around them doing emotes and jumping, or trying to kite the boss into them if they are close enough to the encounter
Seeing as how there are a few other front page threads concerning this path, I’m just going to close this one down to keep the conversations in threads that already exist.
An example of this would be the Snowflake fiasco back during the Holiday event. While I did not participate in this, if I had discovered this by accident while the market was in favor for it, I would have probably been banned as well not knowing that I wasn’t allowed to craft and salvage something in game for items or money.
I’m not psychic. I don’t know what is intended to be in the game and and what isn’t. I’m really trying not to be rude, but that’s the developer’s job. When I utilize everything presented to me in the game I have purchased, which has passed ANet’s QA/QC department and into the live environment, I find it disheartening that I feel like I have to question everything that I consider a clever tactic or a decent money-maker in fear of being banned for exploiting.
We’re very aware of the issue you are saying. It’s hard for us to define that a specific thing is an exploit until we know that it exists. And the moment we know that it exists, people have been abusing it. It puts us in the situation of deciding how to punish while we rapidly attempt to close off the exploit and keep it from being further exploited. My job in the equation is to close the exploit, but someone has to decide how to punish.
In the case of the snowflake exploit, we only banned people we knew did it to extreme degrees, and by extreme I mean multiple thousands. A threshold was decided on, and we acted based on hard evidence, not speculation. That’s generally how we handle every exploit we find – seal it up, figure out punishment thresholds (if any), and move forward from there.
The vast majority may only exploit things a few time as they figure it out, or accidentally exploit because they don’t know any better. Our goal is not to punish those people. But in the case of the snowflake fiasco, we had clear evidence of people exploiting it well over 15,000 (fifteen thousand) times before we managed to seal it up. Those are the people we go after – the ones who deliberately exploit with massive potential economic impact.
Some things sneak by us and our QA. We make so much content that there’s bound to be something that gets by. We try to handle it as best we can though, and I can personally vouch that nobody here has the attitude of “ban them all” – we want to make the smallest impact with our punishment while sending the most clear message that certain behavior is not tolerated.
When in doubt, post on the forums. It will draw our attention, and we’ll let you know. Or PM us / email our exploit alias.
Any exploit that’s a “Jumping Puzzle” and doesn’t specifically bug out is legit in my books. As such I consider the mountain jump in CM legit. Skipping the fire in AC is legit. Standing on top of the ruin so Howling King in AC doesn’t hit you is an exploit.
Legit in your books isn’t legit in ours. The mountain jumping is an exploit since we don’t intend for you to be able to go up there, and it allows you to skip through the natural progression of content we made.
The drakeheads in AC were intentionally made with a cute little workaround, if that’s the other you are implying is okay. I hope that is the issue you are talking about at least, since there isn’t a whole lot of fire in AC.
While I understand your meaning, I’d actually be more inclined to do it with a developer for the ensuing comedy. xD
Yeah, and upon retrospect, whenever I throw on my dev tag for a dungeon, people tend to show me exploits and point them out >.<
However I have been thoroughly amused at times. I tend to hide my dev tags when finding a PUG, and then halfway through the dungeon I will tag up, and watch everyone leave the instance within minutes.
The Weth call: “This dungeon/boss is impossible!” That should get his attention.
That being said, dungeons are more about your personal skill and mastery than about gear. Sure gear helps – it either enhances your strengths or allows you the opportunity to mess up a bit without so much punishment. There are some encounters that can be a bit of a gear check, but overall it’s more about your personal skill. Solo is possible in certain paths – however some of them have required numbers mechanics: Like CoF path 3 where you need to light 3 braziers at once. Those may have a pre-req party count.
However, there are some “grey area” glitches that makes me wonder if something really is an exploit or just a very strange bug.
When in doubt, send us an email anyways, or post on the forums. We’ll inspect it and judge it, and then decide to do something about it.
But generally when it comes to exploits, use your best judgement. One of the things my momma taught me, is that “If you wouldn’t say it around your Grandma, you shouldn’t say it in general.” which I suppose can be translated into “If you wouldn’t do it with a developer in your party, then it’s probably an exploit and you shouldn’t do it.”
On my solo attempts I have noticed that in many cases being ranged would me much much easier than melee. For example you can indefinitely kite many enemies or just zig-zag and avoid their every/most attacks. And a lot more reaction time and melee-only attacks/effects.
More mobile enemies, less fixated aggro and less straying projectiles would quickly balance it.
I’ll admit that the master of solo makes a darn good point
It depends on how well you move, and, again, class mastery. If I can stand -smartly- in front of something utilizing my skills to mitigate damage, then I don’t have to run around and use zigzag/circle strafing to overcome things. Again though, its a class/technique thing, and even then also dependent on the mobs you face.
In the case it is a 1v1 moment, it could be that you are the last survivor of your group on a boss nearly dead, or got ambushed by something while separated from your group. Dungeons are group play, but there are standout solo moments in them.
As soon as you walk into your first dungeons as an inexperienced lowbie you come to the realization that the majority of encounters DO currently favor ranged combat because many bosses have melee-ranged AOE abilities that make it extremely hazardous and then there are fights where you HAVE to used ranged weapons regardless.
Well, I think the thing I take issue with in your reply is what I have put in bold, and how it is something I felt I said in my post. Its about class mastery. It’s easy as ranged to let other people who are melee pull aggro while you stand off to the side and range them – nobody is ever going to argue that. But in the situation that it is a 1v1 and you are left with either melee or ranged, and you have to fend for yourself, I prefer melee weapons and am way better at handling 1v1 that way.
This thread claims that dungeons favor ranged players, which I disagree with. Group dynamics favor ranged players due to them having to be less active in their damage mitigation, allowing them to focus more on damage output. In the moment of a 1v1 though, I feel melee is superior to countering and fighting back. Of course each class/weapon has its strengths and weaknesses in that regard, but from my personal experience in a 1v1, I draw my swords and get to work… but again, it’s all very situation dependent.
Aside from specific incidents, this perception is due mostly to the increased strength of monsters in dungeons, and that people who melee are grabbing more aggro and holding it. People using ranged weapons have an easier time mitigating damage through movement and positioning, making them safer by default than the person who runs in to punch monsters in the face.
That being said, of the light/medium armor sets I play (I won’t even bring guardian or warrior into the fight since we all know they don’t have too much trouble in melee) I actually have an easier time on my mesmer in Melee than my ranger… due purely to how well a melee mesmer can mitigate damage and control. I don’t do as much damage, but I can survive with warriors and guardians for the most part.
I wouldn’t call dungeons as favoring ranged combat, it just depends on how you play. Monsters are dangerous to anyone of any range. A good test is to have some friends clear out some mobs, and try to 1v1 with a particular creature with ranged and melee, and see how well you hold up and survive (hard to longbow DPS while managing a monster eating your face). I often find my melee mesmer (sword/torch) holds up better than my melee ranger (sword/dagger), but it’s certainly varying levels of utility play and mastery of personal technique.
She’s still going to heal while stealthed, I’m not removing that mechanic entirely – just making it less intense. I’d rather not go into the numbers, but you will still need to DPS. You will still need to do good spark runs or she will heal herself up and punish you for it. Groups not knowledgeable of the mechanic and not coordinating will still find this fight very difficult if not impossible because the mechanic still exists. It’s just not as brutal for those who learn it and know what they are doing, and can perform properly.
I think the threshold for a victorious fight should be knowledge and execution of mechanics. Difficulty should come from how flawless we want that execution to be (how forgiving it is to not be perfect), not how many times you should repeatedly execute it.
Personally, I want more difficulty in dungeons, not easier dungeons that everyone can beat. And no, false difficulty from Agony in FotM doesn’t count. Fractals are no harder than any other dungeon, while some Fractals are arguably easier than some other dungeons.
I agree that more difficulty would be better, but a DPS check really isn’t difficulty in my opinion. It’s a mechanic, sure, but after you learn all her mechanics its just down to raw numbers, and I don’t agree that is as fun as running sparks and using tears to cleanse people. Right now Simin just forces you to bring high DPS with you, which I’m not a fan of. Its a tough fight for the wrong reason, and her core mechanics should be more emphasized, not her health bar.
Hey folks, sorry about not having posted in here for a while! But update time!
I took another look at Simin after the spark AI fix, and got more feedback concerning the difficulty. The sparks were a step in the right direction, but it wasn’t enough. I’m going to reduce her stealth healing this time around while I consider other possible changes. As it stands right now she has some nice mechanics with the tears and the spark running, which emphasizes the teamwork we like to see. However all that aside, her healing turns it from a fun mechanics fight to a more hard-nosed DPS check for even the most mechanically skilled groups.
Personally I would much rather see people having fun with mechanics than having meet a DPS check. Considering also there isn’t a visible meter to check your group DPS versus her healing, groups can spend hours doing this and reaching the same result, despite meeting the mechanical skill threshold.
I will eventually change her stealth mechanic so she doesn’t heal during it and instead does something else (like an enrage moment where she is invulnerable), but for now I’ll just take her healing down a peg to reduce the DPS needed to overcome the fight, so people can enjoy the mechanics of it.
Once things are tuned down, there’s a chance the DR System is going to be taken away? It felt for me more of a time “solution”, but yea, main concern is, once everything is tuned, if it is going to stay or not, you know how it can be sometimes.
I don’t think it will ever go away, because there’s always the potential for something to slip past us and enter the game. Not all players will abuse things, but the potential threat to the economy and the game is too high to go back to a system where a safety net is not in place. We saw the data from when it wasn’t in place and what things were like for CoF, and we simply can’t go back to a system open to exploit like it was before.
Of course, I am not in charge of such things. People paid much more than me get to make those decisions
Logic:
1) DR == anti exploit system
2) DR punish people for playing event on that character they want to
3) playing event on that character they want to == exploit
4) exploit == bannable offence
Why don’t you just ban us for not playing your game the way YOU want?
We’re working on our DR system and looking at new data all the time, and like all things there may be bugs or unexpected quirks in it. If we just outright banned people who got hit by DR, that wouldn’t be practical.
It’s entirely possible that the DR system hitting parked event characters wasn’t intended, but was a result of us fixing an exploit or other problem within the system, and it just happened to slip by us in testing.
And like I said before, DR is a safety net to prevent exploitation. That means (to me at least) that is is not the metric for us to drop the ban hammer on people – we have other data used for that. There’s different ways to possibly unintentionally hit it, and I’d think it rather unfair to ban people over it.
For now DR is hitting parked characters who you don’t do anything else with but that specific thing. To avoid being hit by this, whether it is intentional functionality or a bug, do some other stuff on that character.
I wish we didn’t have to have the system, but when exploits arise players abuse them, so we have to have something. We’ll continue to evaluate its functionality and fine tune it.
I’m glad we could create a world you could immerse yourself in. I personally used games to escape some rough moments in my childhood, and know that escaping into virtual worlds is a great way to distract the mind during rough moments, and even inspire change.
If I had to pick one reason that I became a game designer, it is for people like you.
Thank you for your service, and I wish you a speedy recovery.
The fight wasn’t hard, at all. It’s just a tedious fight. The entire strategy revolved around repeating one set of actions over and over again for an extended time. That’s tedium, not difficulty. Reducing the time involved just hastens the inevitable and actually get people to run the path again.
Pretty spot on. The fight wasn’t overly difficult, just tediously long. We plan on revisiting this boss during our Phase 2 pass, but for now this should lower the tedium of this encounter.
Do explain.. why would you fix something that has been bugging us all, and not brag about it? I’d of jumped up from my chair if you put that in the patchnotes! Thanks a bunch for that fix ^^
I’m not in charge of the patch notes, although I did make that request for it since there was considerable attention around the bug. Some bug fixes just aren’t deemed important enough to spend resources on, and some things we simply don’t announce (like some exploit fixes). I try to keep things as transparent as I can though, but the end decision isn’t up to me.
