Sometimes the issue is not that it takes long to finish, sometimes the event has become impossible to complete successfully because of a combo of the more powerful mobs and the new scaling.
Had another incident in the same area as previous. Was helping a research crew set up camp by cleaning out risen. Went smooth until the final site, where a veteran risen abomination spawned alongside the rest of the risen. Instant crew wipe, instant event failure, and i found myself knee deep in risen because the whole ruin was suddenly populated with them.
Ran into a oddity down in Timberline Falls. I was escorting a work crew that was supposed to go build a watchtower. Ran into some ettins, elementals and stalkers, no problem, but round a bend up the mountains i suddenly find myself face to face with 2 veteran ettins and 2-3 normals. The crew was wiped before i could blink, and i barely scratched one of the veterans.
The only NPCs that seem to touch on the ongoing fighting with the centaurs (one big enough to turn northwestern Gendarran Fields into a wasteland) are related to the person looking for a guide to Nebo Terrace. The rest go on and on about prices and people as if there are no threats in the world at all.
To be fair, Lion’s Arch and the Lionguard have a studiously neutrality arrangement with the centaurs. The centaurs leave the havens alone, and Lionguard-protected caravans . . . and the Lionguard don’t drop the hammer on them. You can hear this during a conversation in Kessex Hills after an event in the swampland haven.
Another one is at First Haven in Gendarran, where a soldier says his kid is disappointed because he’s not fighting the centaurs, and his friend says: “Well . . . yeah, we’re not supposed to be fighting them. We’re supposed to be remaining out of that.”
Never noticed this even with all the hours i have spent in the area with multiple alts…
Ran into some respawn oddity down in Timberline Falls. I was fighting a couple of ettins (hate how they seem to step just out of melee range ever so often) and finished off one. Before i was able to take down the second one the first respawned on me, even tho the remaining ettin was at 1/4 health by the time the first one dropped.
This was near Stromkarl waypoint btw.
The problem is that GW2 has bad storytelling. You wouldn’t notice it, but the plot is actually kind of dark, what with all the civilizations being destroyed or displaced by evil dragons. The game simply fails to deliver that and I would agree that it’s due in part to the over-use of goofy and pastiche humor. But that’s something that contributes to the real problem, the overall unrefined storytelling.
It may also be that outside of some parts of the north eastern human areas and the east and north charr areas things are “life as usual”.
To create a living world, you have to ask and address the little things. Where are the displaced people going and how is that affecting the people whose homes there migrating to? What ideals are these people bringing? How are they adapting to the food? Is there enough food for everyone? How is trade being affected?
Personally, I doubt that 70% of tyria is just “life as usual” because the questions the destruction begs can’t be localized to only the other 30%. There has to be some changes going on, and that needs to be reflected in the NPCs. At the very least they should show some sort of concern for the threat (which they barely do).
Sorry, i edited and re-edited that post to try and get at what i was thinking and i clearly failed. What i meant is what you point to, that there is no clear effect of the ongoing fighting in the NPC banter.
The only NPCs that seem to touch on the ongoing fighting with the centaurs (one big enough to turn northwestern Gendarran Fields into a wasteland) are related to the person looking for a guide to Nebo Terrace. The rest go on and on about prices and people as if there are no threats in the world at all.
Or better yet, look at Queensdale. We have centaurs showing up with siege engines, sitting on the only major route between Divinity’s Reach and the nearby villages (never mind the minister’s mansion) and yet nobody seems to blink outside of the nearby fort.
The problem is that GW2 has bad storytelling. You wouldn’t notice it, but the plot is actually kind of dark, what with all the civilizations being destroyed or displaced by evil dragons. The game simply fails to deliver that and I would agree that it’s due in part to the over-use of goofy and pastiche humor. But that’s something that contributes to the real problem, the overall unrefined storytelling.
It may also be that outside of some parts of the north eastern human areas and the east and north charr areas things are “life as usual”.
The game is too sci-fi only because it’s an oxymoron existence. Yaks still pulling wooden carts around yet there’s a giant laser attached to a floating metal zeppelin…makes no sense.
Magic, that’s why.
Also, the races do not seem to cooperate well. Hell, event with the common goal of defeating the dragons the orders can’t see eye to eye until zhaitan puts them knee deep in trouble on their own turf.
The humans and the charr barely have a peace treaty going, with bad blood on both sides (and still need to sort out the Ebonhawke issue). And said charr has only “recently” adopted technology because of the whole flame legion mess.
The asura, while high tech to say the least, seems to have a massive superiority complex and borderline isolationist.
And the orders have only just started cooperating because Zhaitan was becoming a direct threat rather than some issue they may need to deal with eventually.
Never mind that while there were zeppelins flying across the Atlantic, horse mounted cavalry was facing down machinegun emplacements and artillery. Even WW2 still had horses pulling carts and artillery guns. Even today you are likely to find horse and cart being used in various rural places (tho with the person holding the reins quite possibly chatting away on a cheap mobile phone).
kitten will likely happen rapidly in Tyria once the dragons are out of the way and peace can be maintained so that the war time economy can be put to other uses and knowledge exchanged.
AOE has always affected only 5 targets (tho pulsing ones like necromancer wells will hit different ones each time if there are more than 5 within the area).
For a while after launch support AOEs hit all there was, resulting in people bunching up so PBAOE heals would cover the whole group (while incoming AOE attacks only affected a small number of them). This was since corrected to only affect 5 as well.
Dailies are pr account.
(stealthed by Rootnode)
Some interesting points. The trait trees are definitely all over the place, and it seems like the devs weren’t entirely sure what direction to take the necro’s design.
I think perhaps ANet crammed a bit too much into the humble necro. We share “mode switching” (death shroud) with kit engineer and elementalist, and pet/minion with ranger, mesmer and turret engineer. We also do boon/condition manipulation alongside mesmers, and top it all off with life siphon and marks.
Supposedly necromancers are to compensate by applying Death Shroud as a damage sponge.
Now if that thing had a defensive mode (meaning it only absorbed damage, and didn’t take over the whole interface) that may make more sense…
And so this thread has an example of what Brtiva mentioned…
What is even more hilariously tragic about all this is that ANet knew about the issue, and made sure that players can’t do the same to larger mobs by introducing Defiant.
with so much attention maybe the devs will notice they are still over powered and fix a few more things
don’t think so, as they are apparently underrepresented in SPVP.
There is a fine line between challenge and tedium.
Challenge is when you do not know if you will win a fight.
Tedium is that you know you will win a fight, but even winning 50 of them will not get you one step closer to the actual goal.
The OP is talking about tedium, not challenge.
Necro wells OP? What did i miss?
You had too many people on him. These guys scale up against you. We had Half Bake tonight with about 5 or 6 people and used conditions/combos really well. My mistfire wolf did some great dmg too.
Ugh, sounds like ANet didn’t learn anything from the Balthazar temple.
Scaling seems to go haywire once it hits a certain number of characters in both cases.
Almost as if the scaling is set up to be exponential.
Heh, only thing on level is the champion. The rest are 4 levels above the characters and NPCs.
More toughness than the rest of the group, and make sure nobody is playing guardian or anything carrying a shield. After that there is just a matter of not dragging the mob too close to the damage dealers.
Well, I was thinking OF my guardian!
No clue then. Are everyone else around you running around armored to the nostrils?
Ran into this today leveling my engineer.
Best i can tell the difficulty is that the acolyte summons 4-5 thralls that seem to have permanent quickness or something. Managed to finish it once i got myself over to the broken wall, so i had plenty of space to retreat to, and using elixir infused bombs.
I would attack the acolyte, using grenades or elixir gun, get the thrall wave after me, switch to bombs and sit there dropping fire, concussion and smoke whenever they were ready (the occational big ol’ bomb from the toolbelt).
I do wonder if the fight bugged after a bit tho, as the mobs seemed to no longer reset and heal at some point.
More toughness than the rest of the group, and make sure nobody is playing guardian or anything carrying a shield. After that there is just a matter of not dragging the mob too close to the damage dealers.
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.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Dungeon-Patch-Discussion-2-26/page/2#post1528771
Thanks, tho i honestly wish one could opt out of all this “dynamic” fighting via build choices. It seems no matter if one have a uber bunkered guardian or glass cannon elementalist, you will be spending most of your time dodging and running in circles.
This gets especially frustrating when the fighting has to take place inside narrow tunnels and similar, and if you try to move it elsewhere the mobs will just reach the end of their leash and the fight reset to square one.
Or if you get rooted over/over.
“COME HERE!”
High risk , High reward, you kill things faster but you risk wiping, sounds fair.
Now if only i actually felt safer going heavy on vitality and toughness.
All toughness does for warriors is get you aggro, toughness stops being good after 2600 armor.
Even more silly if you play a tank-ish elementalist or similar next to a glass cannon warrior. The mobs will happily ignore the warrior and come for you, even if the warrior would survive longer.
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.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Dungeon-Patch-Discussion-2-26/page/2#post1528771
Thanks, tho i honestly wish one could opt out of all this “dynamic” fighting via build choices. It seems no matter if one have a uber bunkered guardian or glass cannon elementalist, you will be spending most of your time dodging and running in circles.
This gets especially frustrating when the fighting has to take place inside narrow tunnels and similar, and if you try to move it elsewhere the mobs will just reach the end of their leash and the fight reset to square one.
High risk , High reward, you kill things faster but you risk wiping, sounds fair.
Now if only i actually felt safer going heavy on vitality and toughness.
In all honesty i find the pressure to the just as high, but with the fights taking longer to finish and with actually a higher chance that the end is me in down state.
Sad to see you go, Plasmacutter, as we seemed to agree on things.
I wonder if it would be too hard for ANet to replace the togglable autoattack with the ability to hold down a skill key to continue using said skill out of recharge.
I never said I was throwing out my necro are you high? LOL. No, just can’t run the vamp build anymore. Which for my playstyle anyway, was one of the most fun builds necro has but sadly for it to be viable (since they won’t let the siphons scale with healing power) you had to use the pies and now it takes a huge chunk out of the healing to the point there’s no reason to run this build anymore. Time to dust off the scepter and roll condimancer I guess.
I was referring to throwing out the build, however I can see that i worded it badly. After the cost of the daggers though even throwing out the build is foolish for me and I will instead suffer the loss for the time being using instead mango pies. Mind you I’ll most likely save the coin for a good looking scepter to go with one of my daggers so if they decide to nerf us further I will at least have an alternative.
Fair enough, Im not gonna throw out my daggers either though because they still work great as a LF builder. Just sad they killed (at least the dagger version) vamp build. At least the minion one works fairly well now with the new update, and no lifesteal foods needed because it won’t affect the minions anyway.
The vamp build was still born and pie only acted as attempted life support.
Honestly this game is so tilted towards player “skill” regarding defense that it has become a mess for anyone that can’t hit the dodge button the split second a red circle appears.
Unlike Guardians, there “Is” not way a warrior can sustain in melee combat without the food, it doesn’t matter if we are in soldiers, knights or berserker’s gear, we don’t have the boons or the heals or the tools to survive in melee, we rely on other classes to help us, and the food.
I will make a quick guardian build that can sustain itself without food easilly, because guardian was made from the ground up “correctly” to be able to sustain itself.
Warrior doesn’t have the heals, the boons, or the protection to sustain in melee without help.
When you reach a certain point in toughness, it stops mattering as much, and thats around 50%.
We both were referring to the blood magic trait line for necromancers, that have both major and minor traits that streal health. Yet they do so poor a job at it that to really make a “vampire” you need to include weapon runes and omnom pies to have something functional.
And honestly, while i would love to see every other class lifted up to guardian level of sustainability, i suspect that what we will get is guardians nerfed into the ground.
Looks to me like the problem is a combination of stack size, attack pace, and health pool.
PVE confusion is meh because mobs have big pools and slow attacks. But max out the stack on a character that can produce a attack every half second or less, especially if they have a naturally low health pool, and suddenly you are looking at a DPS that can rival a warrior or thief spike.
Removal is all well and good, but with the kind of DPS that can be produced at the high end, you may well be down by the time you have your finger on the removal button.
I never said I was throwing out my necro are you high? LOL. No, just can’t run the vamp build anymore. Which for my playstyle anyway, was one of the most fun builds necro has but sadly for it to be viable (since they won’t let the siphons scale with healing power) you had to use the pies and now it takes a huge chunk out of the healing to the point there’s no reason to run this build anymore. Time to dust off the scepter and roll condimancer I guess.
I was referring to throwing out the build, however I can see that i worded it badly. After the cost of the daggers though even throwing out the build is foolish for me and I will instead suffer the loss for the time being using instead mango pies. Mind you I’ll most likely save the coin for a good looking scepter to go with one of my daggers so if they decide to nerf us further I will at least have an alternative.
Fair enough, Im not gonna throw out my daggers either though because they still work great as a LF builder. Just sad they killed (at least the dagger version) vamp build. At least the minion one works fairly well now with the new update, and no lifesteal foods needed because it won’t affect the minions anyway.
The vamp build was still born and pie only acted as attempted life support.
Honestly this game is so tilted towards player “skill” regarding defense that it has become a mess for anyone that can’t hit the dodge button the split second a red circle appears.
Why are we the only class in the game that gets penalized for using utility skills? Blood is Power, Epidemic anyone?
I think it is attempting to capture the spirit of the GW1 necromancer, where various skills would put a health drain on you (never mind actually remove a percentage of you health) that you could then turn into a weapon the next.
The conversation comes up all the time. Nothing is ever done about it. Ive said before if they increase duration and reduce the damage (as in same damage but over a longer time), I think that would fix it. But GW2 is an easy mode game. Cast times for alot of things are instant and they should not be (IE Necro staff marks). The game is dumbed down for a casual audience and following. I don’t think they are going to change it because of this. Im pretty sure Anet know they have a large casual following and they are going to cater to their main audience.
We must be playing different games…
Dunno, it seems the game employs ample amount of fridge horror.
That is, on the surface it all seems goofy and whimsical. But once you stop and think about it, you get quite a few “ye horror” moments…
There are weapons and utilities that only hit enemies one at a time, but this brings up a question: Why would anyone use a single target weapon in a place where there are hordes of enemies? It would make so much more sense to use multi hitting weapons against multiple enemies.
Luxury of choice? Or the other way round, that one was committed to the fight before one knew one was going up against a group. Never mind that sometimes AOE on auto draws in more trouble than you want. bouncing projectiles have a bad habit of aggroing yellows when out and about for instance.
BTW, I recently learned how to kite. Woot …what a great mechanic. I am using it in everything I do now and am not dying so much.
Maybe i am an old grouch, but my default reaction to kiting is that it is an abuse of game mechanics.
That’s ok, you can be an old grouch if you like. :=)
But for poor players like myself who are trying to learn new things, I need something to help me along as I learn. Eventually, I hope to be a better player and not need to depend on kiting a lot. But for now, it is extremely helpful when I solo.
Thing is, this game turns into a game mechanic abuse into a necessity. It is built around PVP as the balance focus, and in PVP nobody stands still for long. End result is that as the OP illustrates, passive defenses basically suck. This to reduce the impact of so called bunkers that sit on a SPVP point to deny the enemy a capture.
But, in a given theoretical group of players, when an enemy has singled out a player and has started attacking him, that players survivability is dependent on the total DPS of that group.
That, and any healing that the group may give him/her.
Something ANet specifically designed the game against, thanks to no targeted healing spells.
Obviously you never played Ele or Engi support huh, they both have targeted healing spells..
GROUND targeted, not directly targeted at individuals. Meaning you have to catch the person in the AOE, and likely if it is ground targeted then it is a HOT not a instant heal. That, or get up close with him using things like the elementalist dagger #5 or traited warrior shouts.
That btw makes shout warriors perhaps some of the best team healers, as a couple of them standing shoulder to shoulder (or on top of each other, thanks to the game engine) can catch both themselves and their party members in the shout AOE. It may just be 1000 a shout, but with 3 shouts a person it can crazily enough add up.
But to get there you have to reach at least level 60 so that you can dump 30 points into a trait line.
And that illustrates how the game is balanced for SPVP where everyone is level 80 with exotic gear. Under those conditions it is easy to drop 30 in a line and get access to incidental healing traits. Warriors have them on shout, guardians on boons, engineers on explosives and so on. But to get there in PVE you have to stop thru 59 levels where DPS is honestly the only build that really works…
The OP forgot one fundamental question: If you’re a bad player, does toughness/vit suck less?
Sadly no.
As Hrouda implies, the short of it is that there should be no build possible that allows anyone to stand there and get hacked on without any chance of risk.
If only the game actually accounted for that. Just now i finished a personal story mission that played out inside a narrow cave stuffed with risen grub. Movement? Yea right, up or down the tunnel only. With the end result that i would trip the leash limit on the grubs fairly quickly, resetting the fight to square one. Never mind that the grubs put down lingering AOE.
Movement is all well and good, WHEN YOU ARE ACTUALLY GIVEN ROOM TO MOVE!
Don’t worry, when you have experienced the full onslaught of the Dredge Fractal you will know the true meaning of your words.
With the resent event scaling changes i am not sure you need to go to fractals to experience that. Where previously i have found the dredge attack at the west end of Snowden Drifts (Podaga Steading) manageable solo, today i found that i could make no headway what so ever.
The dredge there took so long to kill that i would find the turret of theirs respawning behind my back before i reached the first tunnel support. And no, the event is not flagged as a group event.
While they nerfed healing I cant really say anything about that as every class can sustain themselves for the most part.
Not my personal experience…
As for imbalanced, the entire game is so poorly balanced I can’t tell what effective thing will be the next to go.
The thing is that the game is balanced for SPVP, but there everyone is 80s in exotic. PVE is a very different beast, and it shows.
As Hrouda implies, the short of it is that there should be no build possible that allows anyone to stand there and get hacked on without any chance of risk.
If only the game actually accounted for that. Just now i finished a personal story mission that played out inside a narrow cave stuffed with risen grub. Movement? Yea right, up or down the tunnel only. With the end result that i would trip the leash limit on the grubs fairly quickly, resetting the fight to square one. Never mind that the grubs put down lingering AOE.
Movement is all well and good, WHEN YOU ARE ACTUALLY GIVEN ROOM TO MOVE!
Meh, we already knew that the numbers vs “skill” (more quick reaction time, imo) tilted heavily towards skill on the defensive side of things. Until ANet goes whole hog and implements hit zones and such offense will still be the focus of offense tho.
But with “skill” being what defines defense, all battles become a test of concentration. A test of how long can you keep focus on that mob so that you dodge or get out of the circles in time.
(edited by digiowl.9620)
Sadly those two words are like the proverbial red cloth to a bull.
The fact is that WvW kills don’t belong in the PvE dailies and the Personal Story Completion is down right asinine.
o wvw kills belong in pve dailies since wvw is pve
Funny that, as i see it more often under the PVP banner (leading to some serious confusion with changelogs).
Im doing this solo, although I have to sit up and concentrate. It seems it scales with people in the area, so perhaps alot of the Teq waiters made it scale higher than the 5/6 players could handle?
Reminds me of a issue with the Taumanova reactor and temple of Balthazar, where a small group would have a easier time than a large one (unless it was mega zerg large) because of how the event scaled.
I really don’t appreaciate it when everything is easy and anyone at all can down 10 mobs without breaking a sweat.
Only time i have seen that is “whirl-y farm” zerkers…
I was pondering the same thing earlier, and came to the conclusion that people would feel pressured to do them all to “keep up the joneses”.
“Challenging” translates from ANetese into English as “Spam CC and conditions”
With the hilarity being that we can’t do the same to mobs because of a mob specific ability that refresh automatically…
Honestly the game seem more and more tuned towards the top percentage of PVPers that can solo zergs with one hand on their back.
Why do block skills enter their full recharge when they do not block anything?
Take the engineer shield for instance. If i use any of the two skills, but do not trigger the secondary effects or have any mob hit me for the duration, they still enter their full 30+ second recharge.
This, in my opinion, strongly discourage experimental use of said skills because people worry that they will be on recharge when they really need them.
If they instead had a 5-10 second recharge when they did not block anything, people would be more inclined to test them out.