Guild Wars 2

Weed.

charr charr charr /15

Outside of the optional dodge achievements, i would not say this one is difficult to complete. It is however a bit grindy in that you need 50 power cores from the stompers (tho the recent patch that makes the visible for a while after being destroyed helps there) as well as 25 of 5 different collectibles to open the chests in the lab (one of them you don’t get many off unless you do front line duty in a lane).

I would not mind if a chain could be severed on 4/5. That or reduce the impact of a failure some on the cannon charge.

Meh, i think she is planning to drill down to uproot a certain floral dragon.

The 4 arrows seems to line up nicely with 4 dragons besieging LA and he orders.

skullmount.1758:

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

Well to be fair, I think the Marionette as is, is a a splendid boss fight. It feels epic, the music is great, and it has good mechanics. But I think they’ve made it a bit too hard, and too easy to be failed by random factors. The suggestion to join the other platforms would really improve this battle.

Also, it saddens me that arguably one of the better boss fights in the game, is only here for 2 weeks.

Do we know its gone with the next patch though? Or is it going away with the 3rd patch (first one of February)? First patch of the month content tends to stay for the whole month. Its usually the second patch content thats only 2 weeks.

One reason i wish that ANet would take a long hard look over the fence to Cryptic, and see how they do it. Each time you log in to one of their games you are presented with a interface of multiple tabs showing what is going on in the game world. One of those tabs is a month by month calendar, showing both ongoing and future events. You can even set alerts on future events.

Logging into GW2 sometimes feels like stepping a decade back in time…

One personal anecdote, what may look like a single person on a platform may have started as a full platform but where most got wiped and waypointed out.

Had it happen to me recently with that clockwork horror champ. I am guessing they were hit by the confusion scream and then either killed themselves via auto-attack or weakened via same enough for some other mechanic to get them.

In either case the result was that i dodged some AOE after avoiding the scream cone thanks to the new AOE markers, looked around, and i spotted multiple blue markers. In all honesty i didn’t even consider stopping to help them as that would just up the chance that i would go down as well.

Sadly i was unable to stay alive through the barrage of AOE circles.

In all honesty, some of the champs are mechanically easier to fight than others. One of the worst seems to be the one that has directional invulnerability.

And the tight confines of the platform is not helping, thanks to the camera mechanics. It is pretty much a repetition of the pavilion cage fights.

Now if our character turned transparent when zoomed in close or something, i would not mind as much. But when up to a quarter of the screen is covered by said character, and i can’t really look down to keep track of what i am standing on or in, the chance of a accident skyrockets.

They also blend in nicely with the skin tone of the husks and wurms littering the battlefield.

No wonder that i counted at least a dozen of them roaming the field at every head event. And that was on top of the larva and wurms, turning the battlefield into a glorious green and orange jumble…

Ran into champ 4 today, found that there will be the new orange kind of AOE marker, as well as a black kind of AOE marker. Apparently the black on is “ok” to stand in for a bit.

Honestly tho, the major issue i have with the plaforms is the camera. It bumps into the barrier, filling your view with your character and obscuring AOE circles and things like bombs.

Its as if ANet didn’t learn a thing from the pavilion cage matches…

NovaanVerdiano.6174:

digiowl.9620:

After two out of three wurms, i suspect that ANet didn’t take into account mob scaling when designing this event. I swear i have seen mobs spawn that scale so high i only do glancing damage to them.

And with no reliable taunt or other aggro control the mobs are switching targets randomly, milling about like ants on a caffeine binge.

Husks can only be killed with Condition Damage, if you mean those.

So ANet is trying to break the zerker meta, in the worst possible fashion. Btw, i don’t see anything in the “vaunted” target description that informs me of this. And they seem to mill about the field in mass numbers…

After two out of three wurms, i suspect that ANet didn’t take into account mob scaling when designing this event. I swear i have seen mobs spawn that scale so high i only do glancing damage to them.

And with no reliable taunt or other aggro control the mobs are switching targets randomly, milling about like ants on a caffeine binge.

Bloodstone, anyone?

Yeah, the first server to take down the wurm is likely using 3 channels of TS and teams specifically tasked for each head, with every one in the team knowing beforehand their exact task for the whole run. And i am willing to bet it will be one of the T1 WVW servers, as they already have the people and coordination to get it done.

As stated elsewhere the difficulty is not in the mechanics but in the coordination.

Once people sorted the coordination, Taco went down smack. Same will be done with this once we see guilds forming and likely splitting into arranged teams for each head, with a TS channel or similar for each.

The mess right now is that with a shared map, there is a shared map chat, and so things quickly go down hill in terms of coordination.

Lamir.6702:

Well, the Giant Wurms are immune to crits and the “prepwork” for the three wurms that you need to do before you can damage them require little to no DPS at all. Which doesn’t really promote berserker. But the marionette definitely does.

balls to the wall DPS still helps in clearing out the mass of adds.

If ANet wants us to stop zerker zerging they need to give a way to predictably lure adds out of the way of the main boss mechanics, so that others can get that stuff done.

Right now the boss fights are explosions in paint factories, with little to no way for us players to take any proper control.

End the Zerg: Don’t force us to stack up in the DPS zerg hive toe attack. Make his breath weapon an AoE cone attack targeting the highest concentration of bunched up players and hose that area down with massive DPS and lingering condition damage. The result: “Spread out, for the Six Gods sake, don’t stack on ME!”

As long as the best sources of group boons are found as point blank AOEs, never mind the whole revival speed of multiple people hitting F the moment someone downs, this will never happen.

If ANet wants us to spread out more, give us line and bounce attacks that hurt mobs and support fellow characters just as well as standing right smack on top of them.

VOLKON.1290:

digiowl.9620:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Any failure is simply due to incompetence at this point.

Lets all train hard to we can become leet…

What do you want, an auto-leet feature?

No, what i want is a over the counter pill i can down so that i can forget that GW2 ever existed!

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Any failure is simply due to incompetence at this point.

Lets all train hard to we can become leet…

For a update focused on story, it seems i have to do a whole lot of content…

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

• stuff to unlock (Scarlets journal) that sounds sooo promising, not just a chance for another piece of rare loot

Wish they had made this independent of the freaking marionette loot mechanic…

Gambit.8425:

So a fail, cause people in this game are so incredible bad and can’t kite or dodge a simple mechanic

YAWN

Sarie.1630:

The mobs drop components for a cypher. You can open chests in Scarlet’s base with the ciphers for loot. That seems reasonably fair to me, given they don’t want to encourage the preferential champion slaying just because of the loot they drop.

Figured those boxes were only for the journal. That they also drop loot makes the numbers seem more reasonable (50 once to unlock the room, 25 for each of the chests).

If it is in the open world, anyone can and will blunder into it. Even more so when it has achievements tied to it that adds up to giving you a chest of something or other.

Wheezy.2846:

Well, from when this game was released I remember people liked to discover things. Jumping puzzles, where bosses were, cool hidden areas, etc etc. I think they try to keep some of that. The in game prompts give us some direction, but part of it still supposed to be all ‘adventure-y’ and such. After a few days we’ll all have it figured out, but this way if you want to just play and explore, you can try to figure it out yourself. Like we used to do with video games….

All well and good, when you SOLO!

But when you have a screen full of mobs, toons and particle FX, trying to read the boss animations and observe what works and what does not is nearly impossible. And while that is going on, there is a clock in the corner ticking down towards automatic failure.

GW1 was explorers heaven because it was instanced to the hilt. You could go it alone or with like minded companions to poke and prod at every nook and cranny.

But GW2 is open world, and so inevitably you will have some technicolor rainbow run by, aggro the mob(s) you were trying to figure out, and pull a Leroy/YOLO on your behind.

I swear ANet has put in some overly sensitive anti-modding stuff, meaning that the client have to clear every last loaded file with the server before loading.

I have again and again see things not show on screen until tens of seconds after the loading screen goes away, but with no noticeable HDD activity or other indication that things are still being loaded into RAM.

Arkanaloth.3059:

I suppose…

Thing is I loved GW1, yeah it was tough sometimes but it never felt difficult simply for the sake of being soul-crushing. I always felt as though strategic analysis of a situation could yield positive results (and more often than not they did).

I can’t say the same for GW2…

Should have seen this coming when people were asking for the game to be more like Dark Souls…

Shiren.9532:

They introduce new currencies so that you can’t use wealth you acquired prior to the patch to buy all the new stuff on day one.

Except that these things do not even buy you anything, they are just there to advance the story by gaining access to Scarlet’s lab and the lock boxes within. And to do so you have to trash a bunch of stomper towers and repeat the marionette event (or grind the relevant mobs, wherever they are located).

Unless this journal of her’s is some kind of legendary gear item, it seems excessive. I may be interested in the plot, but come on…

munkiman.3068:

digiowl.9620:

VOLKON.1290:

digiowl.9620:

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

• Don’t spam trash mobs all over the arena, along with circles of death and hundreds of players!

This is the main one IMO. With the game having no taunt mechanic there is no way to pull the mobs to a side and focus them down, instead they ramble around after whoever they fancy targeting based on whatever opaque aggro mechanic ANet gave them.

Never mind that even the lowly at level trash mob has enough health to tie down just about anyone for a pointless amount of time if they are not running zerker to the hilt.

My tank bomber engineer watched one of the pirates eat bomb after bomb after bomb.

Watched? Shouldn’t you have killed him instead?

I was trying to, but i am not zerker built…

I personally believe the Cobalt Wurm, now that it’s not bugged, is the easiest one to defeat. We had him down the most during the fight, since you don’t have to have them all at once. It does get progressively harder as more mobs spawn however. Best to have a smaller group keep them busy, while people run kegs.

I was not talking about the boss! I was talking about some random add that spawned within the event area that i tried to take down to buy the keg carriers some space. And not some bronze, silver or gold either, just a lowly gray boring mob.

VOLKON.1290:

digiowl.9620:

VOLKON.1290:

digiowl.9620:

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

• Don’t spam trash mobs all over the arena, along with circles of death and hundreds of players!

This is the main one IMO. With the game having no taunt mechanic there is no way to pull the mobs to a side and focus them down, instead they ramble around after whoever they fancy targeting based on whatever opaque aggro mechanic ANet gave them.

Never mind that even the lowly at level trash mob has enough health to tie down just about anyone for a pointless amount of time if they are not running zerker to the hilt.

My tank bomber engineer watched one of the pirates eat bomb after bomb after bomb.

Watched? Shouldn’t you have killed him instead?

I was trying to, but i am not zerker built…

Why would you need to be ‘zerker to kill someone? That makes no sense. I’m mostly PVT (from WvW) and don’t have trouble.

Oh i managed it, eventually. It just took way to much time for what was a filler mob and not the boss.

When reading the title i thought it would be about putting in arbitrary “complete by” timers on boss events.

VOLKON.1290:

digiowl.9620:

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

• Don’t spam trash mobs all over the arena, along with circles of death and hundreds of players!

This is the main one IMO. With the game having no taunt mechanic there is no way to pull the mobs to a side and focus them down, instead they ramble around after whoever they fancy targeting based on whatever opaque aggro mechanic ANet gave them.

Never mind that even the lowly at level trash mob has enough health to tie down just about anyone for a pointless amount of time if they are not running zerker to the hilt.

My tank bomber engineer watched one of the pirates eat bomb after bomb after bomb.

Watched? Shouldn’t you have killed him instead?

I was trying to, but i am not zerker built…

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

• Don’t spam trash mobs all over the arena, along with circles of death and hundreds of players!

This is the main one IMO. With the game having no taunt mechanic there is no way to pull the mobs to a side and focus them down, instead they ramble around after whoever they fancy targeting based on whatever opaque aggro mechanic ANet gave them.

Never mind that even the lowly at level trash mob has enough health to tie down just about anyone for a pointless amount of time if they are not running zerker to the hilt.

My tank bomber engineer watched one of the pirates eat bomb after bomb after bomb.

And that mob was likely one that spawns in the are and not really tied to the event at all, it just scaled up a bit from the presence of so many characters. The event mobs were all red level numbers and vet, elite or champ.

ViralVarda.2739:

Welp, then don’t do them.

I would not, if they didn’t tie into learning more about the story first hand (rather than looking at some video or screen grabs done by others).

Now if they tied into some exclusive skin or other at the end, i could understand the numbers. But i see nothing of the sort being listed anywhere. At best we seem to end up with yet more bank filler in the form of a completed journal.

I think we will see more of this going forward.

When the nightmare tower happened, the story writers were given training in how to edit the game world. This paid out massively in livening up the camp ground on the hillside, with NPCs milling about and interacting.

Elbegast.6970:

Lord Kuru.3685:

They’re starting with the axiom that the story is great. Thus the failure of the story must be from players mis-understanding them.

Bobby Stein Jr. actually said that to me. He said that the reason I didn’t understand the living story plot line was because I was not playing the game properly or was not paying enough attention to the story details. It was extremely insulting.

Oh dear…

Romo.3709:

To be honest the most fun I’ve had in this update was this one instance. It made my day and practically gave me hope for future LW (LS) content.
Aside from that, waiting around for an hour at the time for 10-15 minutes of fun is well… not very engaging.

Never mind the stomper grind to get on with the story…

I guess this is the continuation of the story writers learning to edit game elements during the tower development.

50 parts needed to enter the lab, 10 given initially, 1-3 given pr tower, about 3 towers pr map. Then there is the 25 pr key for 5 lockboxes…

I have no idea how someone managed to get through all this within the first few hours of the patch rolling out, as doing just one stomper is enough for me to log out of the game in disgust.

Had a go at this wurm head today, and ANet really need to figure out their event scaling.

Sure, i am built tanky rather than zerker. But when i end up face with a at level trash mob pirate and it eats bomb after bomb (playing engineer), i can see why people go “zerker or GTFO”.

Never mind that with a targeting system that stinks (i tabbed, cleared target, tabbed again, and didn’t get the wurm head until i moused for the transparent yellow crosshair), and no practical add management (The CC available is long cooldown, usually single target, and very short duration. Never mind the complete lack of taunts) makes these fights a glorious technicolor mess.

Any kind of open world group event seems to devolve into a bar brawl right now.

I suspect it will mechanically be similar to precision. In that x amount of ferocity result in 1% critical damage. This is really how ANet should have done critical damage from day one, rather than putting percentages directly onto the gear and trait lines.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Tim.6450:

Dalanor.5387:

I just cant think of anything why they (Anet) tought ICD is a good idea, to prevent some OP stuff with this kill. Only mesmer clones cause some problem, they just generate more hp with each attack to the necro (actually every attack that has really low damage), but this makes some counterplay against a mesmer and necro.
The ICD on the active with long cast time is just another “what the hell?” idea. The stack on the the enemy already makes a cap why another? Oh and the 5 second window while the mark is active …

I think the ICD is to make sure that you don’t take all 25 stacks for yourself.

Best the necro can do is 23 stacks claimed, unless they get Quickness from somewhere. That said, getting that value requires blowing at least three 30 second+ cooldowns, flashing Death Shroud (so no defense for the next 6-10 seconds) and at least 10 in Curses, plus managing to keep them in two wells for that whole period. Any blinds, blocks, evades, interrupts, or invulnerabilities from the opponent drastically limits this as well.

Sounds like one of those corner cases that ANet seems to love balancing around…

The Lost Witch.7601:

Oh… and they should fix the bug where your mortar can get stuck if you press the skills too rapidly. (Although… they may have done that already?)

They did, by putting in a general cooldown on all mortar skills.

haviz.1340:

You increase your support via traits (pure of voice, elemental attunement, etc) and that’s a better option than to have it tied to gear. Let’s imagine a new dungeon (yes, I might have taken that too far) where support is very efficient and sought. You want to play with a group of friends but all of you have offensive gear and traits. Is it easier for 1-2 people to retrait for 3.5s each or get a new sets of gear? As long as anet wants people to randomly create successful parties while giving the incentive to play more supportive we need to have a gear that doesn’t influence said support.

I really wish that the gear to trait line ratio for stats were reversed. Right now some 2/3 of the stat total come from gear.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

The problem with this, not every class can even be “supportive” You have Ele, Engi, Guardian as the main ones, sure you get a few AoE heals or something. Mesmer is decent with Feedback, Chaos Storm and such but still not enough compared to Engi, Guard and ele. Necromancer has like a Heal and thats about it for example…

This depends on how wide one define support. For necromancer, support can be seen as condition manipulation (plague signet) and conversion (well of power).

But very little of that is stat related. And it depends on the enemy fought is using conditions in the first place.

Guardians are boon dispensers like no other, and very often hand out aegis simply by proximity. And you can still go balls to the wall zerker as a guardian and provide said boons.

Aza.2105:

Stand The Wall.6987:

Ok everyone for the last time, you have to consider the combination of an increased healing power with another passive, like condi and retal…
Passives are what many agree to be ruining the game. Enough passives and the trinity becomes necessary to keep the whole thing together.

Stats by nature are passive.

You get power to passively raise your attack power.
Critical hits are passive and rng.
Critical damage is passive.

The only difference is that toughness doesn’t have skills affected by it. Other than that offense stats are the opposite of defensive ones.

Pretty much this. offense in this game is still the typical MMO RNG, but defense pretty much active. This because active defenses (dodge, block, aegis, blind, the list goes on and on) override the passives found in toughness and vitality, by virtue of being damage negators (they negate one or more hits, full stop).

I posted it elsewhere on this forum, and i suspect is is just a wild eyed brainstorm, but i found myself wondering how the game would play if the active defenses boosted the passive stuff rather than override it.

Meaning that if you dodge you are not completely immune to incoming damage, but much like with the protection boon you get a percentage reduction of damage. This would then compliment toughness rather than override it, by acting pretty much as a temporary toughness buff.

One issue i foresee as i think about it more is conditions, as they only need to hit to begin ticking. As such, a change like this would further entrench the condi-bunker PVP meta.

And that is why i consider it a wild eyed brainstorm, as it would likely require a wholesale rebalancing of the game. Tho IMO, that is required for the PVE side anyways as the core issue with PVE right now is mob behavior across all of PVE.

Another alternative is to introduce swappable weapon skills for each slot.

Meaning that for #1 you have X number of skills to swap between, same with #2 and so on. But each skill selection is locked to that slot.

Thus allowing variations within a weapon (knockback vs knockdown and so on), but keeping the overall theme of the weapon.

pretty much a pipe dream in the sense that it would require a wholesale re-balancing of both PVE and PVP, but i need to get this off my chest.

What i am thinking is that Instead of having the active defenses be a all or nothing (negation) thing, how about they provide a temporary reduction of incoming damage?

This way they interact with passive defenses rather than overriding them (and thus making them pretty much worthless).

Vargamonth.2047:

digiowl.9620:

Vargamonth.2047:

Mixchimmer.7230:

Oh, play style is absolutely affected by non-gear factors — I will not disagree with you there. Like I said earlier, I agree that their content is a large chunk of the problem, Tequatle was literally just a DPS check.

There are a whole lot of different things that change the play style. I don’t particularly think altering gear is going to fix it. I do feel that is it a baby step in the right direction though. All I know is I’m personally sick of DPS dominating all PvE content and I’m ready for the meta to be shook up. Whether changes to gear, changes to content, new content, or deciding that GW2 is no longer the game for me, is what will cure the sickness is yet to be seen.

The problem is … Tequatl absolutely needed to be some kind of DPS check.
It can’t be critted, so Precision/CritDamage become completely useless for anything but defending risen spawn point. Same goes for Condition Damage because of the condition cap. Only Power, major in one of the most bulkiest sets ingame, is useful, so it can hardly be a DPS check on a gearcheck basis.
It’s a DPS check done in a really good way, mostly performance dependant.
If you’re going to have a zerg of bunkerish geared players that, even if they die, will be back in about a minute … how do you fail the event without a DPS check at all?

Remove the timer, make it be about defending the batteries and the cannon from the word go. Most Taco failures fail without ever seeing the first cannon event.

But that part already exist.
What do you want to do? Make it the only part where you can fail the event (which almost never happens)? Get rid of defense phases and make the regular spawns (which are usually handled by 3 small 4-5 man groups) go for those batteries?

How do this punish crappy turret usage? How do this punish people dying at Tequatl itself over and over?

The only problem with Tequatl is that it scales horribly and is designed to require A LOT of people.

Almost never happens? Unless something has changed without me noticing, it constantly fails outside of the forced overflows that the Taco specific guilds maintain.

Yes yes, zerk and evade is the one true way to play! Everyone else are just noobs that have yet to see the light! /s