Guild Wars 2

Robert Hrouda.1327:

We try to be as transparent as possible with our changes. Some things, like closing exploits, we aren’t always going to post about. You never want to directly put down someone’s idea though, or point out specific people since that can have unforeseen consequences (ahem).
But yes, there are good player suggestions that we outright implement without any tweaking whatsoever. “crystals are too hard to kill” being an example. Yup, they’re a bit on the tough side for how many there are at any given time – nerfing the toughness seems appropriate. That’s gonna happen on Monday though, but I felt it was a solid example

This is good news. I am looking forward to it.

Unless it breaks… then you will be in for another week of anger. No pressure. :d

I don’t know exactly what I want. I expected Guild Wars 2 to wow me, because they have been wowing me with all the other elements and features of their game.

What I do know is that the dungeons that can be found in Guild Wars 2 are very uninspired. The layouts are very traditional, with the exception of some event-like mechanics, and the bosses are straightforward and unimpressive. It sounds like I am simplifying dungeons for the sake of my argument, and, I believe, in some ways, I am, but I just don’t love Guild Wars 2 dungeons as much as I do the dungeons in WoW or Vindictus or Borderlands 2 or Dragon Nest.

Borderlands 2 has interesting loot going for it, as well as lively characters and funny dialogue.

WoW has loot going for it as well, as well as consistency. People might argue that it is really easy, and others might argue that you can give yourself the option of challenge. That’s besides the point. The main strength of WoW, I find, is its consistency. Dungeons get harder and harder. Raids slowly increase in difficulty. You feel like you are progressing.

Even if you dislike WoW, I feel Guild Wars 2 would benefit from having consistency. You can make this game as hard as you want, but it should be consistent.

Vindictus is a challenging game, and it is somewhat grindy. But I didn’t mind the grind, because the boss fights were interesting. Most of the boss fights feel unique, and everyone might die a lot of times, but you feel accomplished for beating bosses. And some bosses take a good amount of time to beat. The rewards in Vindictus are based on how lucky you are, so you literally get nothing a lot of the time. But it doesn’t matter, because the boss fights are truly interesting—at least to me, anyway.

People don’t mind difficult if bosses are interesting, like in Vindictus. Dark Souls also has difficult bosses, but people are okay with it due to the bosses being interesting first and difficult second. These games aren’t interesting and the bosses aren’t interesting due to the difficulty. They are interesting, and they are also difficult.

In Guild Wars 2, some of the boss fights are interesting, but most of them are straightforward. What makes them annoying is that they are straightforward and the bosses have a lot of health and take a while to kill. Bosses having a lot of health and taking a while to kill only serves to agitate players even further, because this boring fight will last for a while.

So, I don’t know what I want exactly to love Guild Wars 2 dungeons, but I do know what I enjoyed in other games. I don’t want Guild Wars 2 to simply take from other games, because I am not playing those other games for a reason. Well, I’m not playing them at the moment. Well, not Vindictus anyway. I want Guild Wars 2 to realize what makes other games fun and spin it in a new way and destroy the other games.

:)

But the dungeons are broken. Well, some of them, anyway.

Oh, before the 25th, they implemented a patch that gave us diminishing returns that affected money and experience.

The system is simply broken. If it were working properly, unless you exploit or run a dungeon multiple times extremely quickly, you will get 60 for the first run and 20 thereafter. It’s SUPPOSED TO only affect people who exploit or clear over and over the same path very quickly.

I believe they are doing extensive testing on this next patch to not introduce any more problems, so this next one will fix everything? Well, it’ll fix everything regarding the diminishing returns system that may or may not have been necessary had they actually spent time and effort in fixing exploits, bugs, and broken things. But I digress.

You’ll have to point that post out, because that seems significant.

What the crazy are you on? I do not know if joking or just _________.

Diminishing Returns was implemented a lot earlier than the 25th…

I take it you think it was implemented on the 25th, because you’re reading the patch notes that came out on the 25th, which means that you either just hit 80 or did not do any explorable dungeons for the past two weeks.

I think people are just frustrated that of the —five-- weeks that the game has been out, the diminishing returns system has been implemented and bugged for two of them.

And dungeons are what people like to do when they hit 80. What you have to fall back on are dynamic events, crafting, map completion, and WvW. However, these things can only keep someone interested for so long. Map completion can’t be done for long periods of time by everyone. Dynamic events, while interesting the first few times, tend to get monotonous after a while.

The game is best when you can do a little bit of everything, and right now, people are frustrated that dungeons are not working as intended. They haven’t been. And even when you get past the diminishing returns system problems, you still have bugs and broken mechanics and such.

Two out of —five-- weeks of launch. That’s kind of a big deal. Let’s be honest. When games first release nowadays, they have about a month to hook people and keep them interested. I’ll leave that there.

Arena Net could do much, much better with dungeons. I think everyone can agree with that. If you hold dungeons up next to everything else, they pale in comparison.

Edit: Just kidding. Five.

Who is running the same path for 60 60 60?

Are you sure you’re not reading someone saying P#, meaning Person #?

But how will we stop the exploiters?

I mean… besides fixing the exploits. I know the argument is that there will always be exploits, but wouldn’t fixing exploits as they arise be much better than adding a system that has had a negative impact on most players for the past two weeks?

The game has been out three weeks, and the diminishing returns system has been broken two of them. :x

It’s supposed to be anti-exploit, but the conditions are a little too broad and affect almost everyone.

I believe the dungeon developers are just out of touch. It’s unfortunate, because, other than bugs here and there in other parts of the game, dungeons are what weigh Guild Wars 2 down from an amazing game to simply a good game. This is not a comment as to the difficulty of the dungeons but the primitive design of them. The overall combat is amazing, but the dungeon system and dungeon design themselves can be found in a lot of lesser games.

Oh.

When I only got 45 tokens, and my friend got 60, we were doing AC Explorable. It took an hour.

I had previously farmed the Twilight Arbor set and been affected with the bugged Diminishing Returns. My friend had not been doing any dungeons.

So maybe it might be a lot of people had diminishing returns going into the fixed system, and the fixed system is unable to properly reward them.

While it is entertaining, I don’t think, “Clearly if 3 players (and potentially only 2) can run an entire route that is neither bugged nor exploitable, then teams of 5 should never have any problem,” is necessarily true.

Times change. People want to be rewarded for their time. When I was a kid, I could spend all day playing video games, and it would be a good day. Everything was new and shiny.

Now? I have less time, and things that are new and shiny hard to come by. Guild Wars 2 dungeons? New the first time but not all that shiny. I liken them to those of lesser Asian MMOs. If the dungeons were innovative, I could see myself being as drawn to them as I am to all the other features of this game. But they aren’t. They are pretty basic.

I applaud those of you who are able to run Guild Wars 2 dungeons 100+ times for the experience alone, but that is not me. I can run something once or twice for the fun of it. And if I were to run it more, it would have to be for something substantial. Part of MY fun is the reward.

I thought they fixed it, because when I did AC yesterday, I seemed to be able to hit the burrows 100% of the time. There weren’t any complaints from the other members, either.

Before, it was awful. I had to circle around it and search for the constantly changing hitbox. It felt like I had a 20% hit chance on it.

So if you are experiencing it, I might just been lucky. A long time ago, I think one of my guildies found it almost impossible to hit it with a bow, but he was able to hit it with a greatsword as a Ranger.

Yes, we should expect bugs, but Arena Net’s track record is pretty awful at this point.

They released an amazing game. There was a problem with people speed-clearing CoF, so they decided to implement a Diminishing Returns system. I believe this was overkill, but that’s fine. The Diminishing Returns system did not end up working properly. So they patched it again, and it became even worse. So they patched it again, and, while some people are getting better rewards, some people are still experiencing a bugged Diminishing Returns system.

And we haven’t even touched the amount of exploits that are running rampant and going unpunished. They haven’t touched boss encounters that are simply broken broken. There are still a lot of bugs that crash people and prevent players from progressing.

Programming is not easy, which is why we leave it to the professionals to do. Arena Net is a good company. I am sure that their employees are among the best and brightest. So it is somewhat disconcerting when more things break as they are trying to fix things.

It’s somewhat sad when someone brings up a problem in Mumble, and my immediate response without being phased or surprised is, “Oh, it’s probably broken.” And, yes, I expect to say that at every new game’s release. But I have said it so many times that, when I played Borderlands 2, I had to stop myself operating under the mindset that everything’s broken.

I am a firm believer that Guild Wars 2 has the potential to be amazing in the long run, because almost all of its other aspects have wowed me. It’s just the dungeons, which I absolutely love in other games, seem like they do not share the same standard of excellence as the other areas. They have antiquated designs for a game that tries so hard to break the mold, and, now, they suffer from a convoluted system that was meant to stop speed clears but actually affects EVERYONE -negatively-.

Le sigh. I am becoming very jaded as I pay attention to how dungeons are being handled. I used to be a very positive person. It’s probably time for me to just call it a bust for now.

It helps to pay attention to cooldowns on monster abilities and to prepare yourself accordingly.

If you are expecting an attack and don’t have a defensive cooldown or energy for a dodge, stay away.

Yeah. I don’t know how I’d feel about TA if I wasn’t able to rally off the blossoms.

Those blossoms are a blessing in disguise.

When I farmed my set, I was able to consistently get into PUGs that could finish in 20-30 minutes. The people in my groups were usually people who were also farming the dungeon, so everyone knew what to do and how to do it efficiently.

Even when I joined a group of players that were new to the dungeon, and we cleared everything, it ended up taking us about 40 minutes. If that group ran it a few more times, we would be able to do it in 20-30 minutes as well.

It’s not that uncommon, so a system that takes into account the speed at which you clear a dungeon is not ideal. I would rather have lockouts and decent rewards than diminishing returns based on speed.

Square Enix is adding a Diminishing Returns system to prevent players from farming dungeons quickly all day and to balance the rewards between casual players and powergamers. If you are able to run dungeons quickly, you are encouraged to slow down and run other dungeons or craft and do the much faster Dynamic Events for competitive rewards and enjoy Guild Wars 2 that way.

Oh wait.

I mean ArenaNet is adding a Fatigue system that slowly puts diminishing returns on the experience you get while playing the game so that casual players are on more equal footing with hardcore players. If you have more time to play, you are encouraged to craft and enjoy the other features FFXIV has to offer.

Oh wait. I just get so confused sometimes.

For… more information at a later time? Or is the post telling us that its our fault the one we should be looking at?

Because, as I stated before, I did not complete a run in 10 minutes, and I ran another dungeon before it. I ran it in an hour, and my friend received 60, while I received 45. I should not have experienced diminishing returns.

It is not my fault, and I am starting to really dislike your posts, dear Sir. I am playing by your arbitrary rules, so I will not be told I am to blame for diminished rewards. I am the only one of my friends who still has hope for Guild Wars 2, and I am starting to get fed up.

I apologize for being short, but I do not like this attitude of diverting blame. I am trying to work with you.

ARGGHHHGHGH. Back to Panda.

When all the bugs and such are fixed in the general areas and the dungeon rewards/diminishing returns system are handled, Guild Wars 2 will be amazing.

I am going to treat Guild Wars 2 like I did Guild Wars 1. In Guild Wars 1, it was fun for a while. I enjoyed my initial experiences, and then I hit a wall. Prophecies got incredibly hard, and I did not want to invest the time necessary to continue—as I like soloing. Then when Guild Wars 2 came out, they released the HoM rewards, so I returned to GW1 and bought all the expansions.

There were still areas that I could not complete on my own, but with 7 heroes, the previous walls that I hit were broken. The game was extremely fun. Because Guild Wars 2 was coming out, Arena Net made a lot of changes to Guild Wars 1 to make it less grindy. I got 30/50 over two months, and I had a great time.

With Guild Wars 2, it’s turning out to be the same thing. They need to prolong the game by making things harder to get, which is understandable, so I’m just going to wait until Guild Wars 2 becomes the game for me.

It’ll eventually happen. Guild Wars 2 just needs a little extra shining.

The problem with not disclosing what the Diminishing Returns system actually does is that we can’t tell you if it is working properly or not. The less you tell us, the less we can give you feedback about whether or not the patch was successfully implemented.

You have reasons for not telling us everything, but, of the two I can think of, neither will yield as positive results as you telling us honestly what you intend to change.

The first possible reason is that you don’t want people to find ways to exploit the system by working around it. While it’s admirable that you think this will work, people WILL figure out your system. For example, when I couldn’t figure out why I was getting such low rewards, I created a topic to pool information to find out if others were having the same experience. Even if you don’t want us to do that here, we will do it on some other forum.

And people who like to exploit systems regularly are extremely smart and resourceful. The only way you can prevent your game from being exploited is by making smart fixes. Putting a handkerchief over our eyes only works temporarily.

The second reason is that you don’t want us to know when patches fail, because you get a lot of negative attention for it. True. The community is extremely fickle, hard-to-please, and seemingly unforgiving at times. BUT, if we don’t know what you truly intended to do, we’ll assume that all the problems you have patching are intended changes. When that happens, the backlash you will get on forums will be even worse.

When the Diminishing Returns patch was broken and gave me 2 silver on my second run, I didn’t mind, because I read on the forums that it was an unintended bug.

Complete transparency is impossible, but honest communication where both sides have all the information and can come to informed decisions, opinions, and resolutions is not. It’s something that should be worked towards.

Don’t worry. We still love you. Sort of. I mean… these patches are kind of killing us, man. Ho ho.

I did AC Explorable today. My friend got 60 tokens. I got 45 tokens, 19 silver, and 133k experience.

1) I haven’t run a dungeon in 2 days.
2) I hadn’t run Ascalon Catacombs Explorable in a couple of weeks.
3) I’ve run other dungeons since then.
4) The run took about 1 hour.

There is no reason I should have gotten 45 tokens. I clearly did not run the dungeon too fast, because someone else got 60 tokens. I also did not grind that dungeon. I was there the entire time.

So is there another condition that we must fulfill, or is this patch broken for some people?

That is disappointing.

Might I recommend Borderlands 2. It is very well done, and the story is amazing.

Hopefully, one of these patches work the way they intend them to, because on paper, Guild Wars 2 is changing for the better.

Exploits should be punished.

End of question.

Players should not get the idea that they can capitalize on whatever new exploits there are until they get fixed. They should be afraid of using exploits, because they already know that there are consequences to their actions.

Anyway, that’s how I would like a game company to do things. How Arena Net handles such things is still up in the air. They actually seem kind of relaxed about exploiting. It’s kind of sad.

You are assuming.

When you look at how all over the place dungeon difficulty is, you have to wonder who tested it and how they tested it.

Not to mention a lot of encounters in dungeons are simply broken—as in not working. Ideally there are internal testers and then the patch goes to a beta test server where you can further test, but Guild Wars 2 doesn’t have a public test server. So it makes you wonder if they have an internal team for testing and if that’s enough.

Don’t get me wrong. Arena Net is an amazing company, and they released an amazingly polished game. But some of the issues that we’ve been having can be obviously spotted if they ran through it once, like some boss abilities not even working. Great companies are not immune to oversights.

It encourages people to space it out and have fun with it. It’s a good change. It also promotes doing multiple paths.

I can vouch for gear being relevant.

The worse you are, the better gear you’ll want. I did the Explorables with Rare gear I bought off the Trading Post. After I finished farming, I can easily say that I am considerably tankier in Exotics than I was with Rare gear. I don’t -think- my damage changed that much, but I definitely feel like I can stand there for a while and take hits.

So, yeah, I believe that if people are having issues with the Explorables, they can get better gear by other means and come back. Exotics are not exclusive to dungeons, so that’s not a problem.

I agree that more transparency would be a good thing.

Although, I have a feeling that the developers are out of their depth with Guild Wars 2. Guild Wars 1 did very well, but it did not have nearly as wide and far-reaching player-base as Guild Wars 2.

Take that as you will.

Don’t call people victims. It’ll hurt your poll numbers.

Surprise!

Sera is correct. If the party leader leaves the party or is kicked out, everyone is forcibly removed from the dungeon.

So instead of reading my light-hearted post in its entirety for what it was as a whole, you chose to analyze my use of the word, “instead,” and make assumptions as to my understanding of the system instead.

You know what else requires mashing a combination of keys/buttons?

Fighting games. But I’m not about to challenge Daigo Umehara in a money match of Street Fighter. Clearly, you can show considerable skill in mashing a combination of keys or buttons.

Heck. Typing is mashing a combination of keys, but I’m not about to try and write a book—although apparently, single moms can do it in cafes and make billions.

So, yes, you can be skilled in MMOs. And there are people who prove it to us time and again. You could argue that their skill is not worth very much, and I would agree with you. But you can’t argue against the existence of skill.

I also agree with you that a casual player can do well in Guild Wars 2. I just don’t agree that with you that some players aren’t naturally better than others—ahem, talent. Or some players haven’t acquired their skills with a whole lot of practice—ahem, special skill.

This sounds incredibly pointed, but it’s not fully directed at you. It’s directed at people who are using such an argument as an excuse not to do better. In whatever you do, try your hardest and do your best; whether it’s play MMOs or your job or your studies or your hobbies. Or don’t. But don’t bring down others due to your own insecurities.

It’s unnecessary.

And, no, I’m not particularly fond of elitists, either.

I feel like you could have saved yourself a lot of time if you just quoted the rest of my post as well.

You know… the part where I told you that I understood the distinction.

I agree that dungeons are difficult and unforgiving for people who are complete fresh to them and I can understand how frustrating it can be for you to be in a party that ragequits, but you can see the silver lining in what you just said. People who know how to do them are successful. This might seem like an obvious statement, but the difference between the successful PUGs and the unsuccessful ones are people who know the encounters.

And I did most of the dungeons with a group of my friends who were evenly leveled, so we were always fresh to the dungeons. It took some extra doing, but we slowly learned the encounters to the point where we too knew the encounters.

Now, I’m not saying dungeons aren’t broken or imbalanced and shouldn’t be fixed and re-balanced. I just believe that people not knowing encounters is not a reason for Arena Net to make it easier. It’s when people DO know encounters and have tried everything, only to have a minority be successful, that Arena Net should consider balancing.

Also, just to reiterate what I’ve been saying in other topics: When the difficulty slider of a dungeon seems all over the place, there’s a problem. Challenge is great. Extreme challenge, and then cakewalk final boss is stupid.

I’m sorry that this happened to you, and I agree that this needs to be changed if it becomes more commonly abused.

Though I would suggest against simply making the number of required votes larger, because this safeguard would prove more annoying for the vast majority of party issues. Another solution is needed.

A lot of people do TA.

It just runs into this bug every now and then.

Whoa there. It sounds like I should be more defensive, because that wasn’t me being defensive in my previous post.

In any case, you’re still trying to force players to play the way you feel the game should be played. Guild Wars 2 hasn’t exactly made it a point to have you kill everything. In fact, there are many events and missions where you do not kill everything. There are some dungeons that encourage the idea that you are not meant to kill everything.

For example, take CM explorable Butler (That’s what she said). In the room after the hallway of spike traps, there is a group of monsters with several elites. I’m going to say elites, because you get what I mean. I don’t exactly know the Guild Wars 2 term for them. Lieutenants? But I digress. There are a lot of elites thrown in with a lot of regular monsters. The elites also litter the entire room with bombs. I was in a group of friends, where we couldn’t figure out how to get past the giant group that was next to another giant group without killing a few and then dying a few times.

And then I realized, oh wait, there’s a ramp right before them. Oh wait, there’s a walkway past them. Oh wait, there’s a drop into the next room.

At first, I wondered if it was intended. Essentially, all you need to do to get past the group is Swiftness. That’s something that any group is likely to have. And then, in the next room, there were only a few monsters in a group. Yep. Intended.

I’m sure you could kill all of them if you ran your face into it enough or had a geared enough group, but the way out is there right in front of you.

So no, I don’t believe devs intend for you to kill everything. I think Guild Wars 2 has done a good job of encouraging you to approach things creatively—to an extent.

And there is no malice or grudge in my posting intent.

If you look at it that way, good teams ARE capable of working together and using all their skills to whittle down the CC immunity until the ONE CC they want lands.

As for getting downed meaning you are failing, that’s not necessarily true. I believe the game was designed around the fact that you could be downed and brought back up. I know. It goes against my survival instincts, but Borderlands 2 has helped me with this.

The downed system is a conscious effort on their part to promote team play. In a dungeon, if one person is downed, you don’t have a problem, because whoever else the boss focuses on can lead it away and the others can help revive. As long as multiple people don’t get downed at a time, you are rewarded for your collective effort to get people back into the fray. Borderlands 2 does this as well, because it promotes you running into a fight and reviving yourself with Second Wind, which fully replenishes your shields.

The way I know Arena Net, in part, also wants to encourage people to not think that getting downed is complete and utter failure is that there are many traits that give you abilities while you are downed or while you are reviving someone else. They EXPECT you to get downed and get revived by your teammates. Otherwise, they would have made fights more forgiving—less one-shots—, if they’re not complete sadists.

I am always striving to not die during fights in Guild Wars 2, but I have come to realize that there are acceptable sacrifices. If someone is downed and almost dead dead, throwing yourself into harms way and getting downed to revive them enough to survive the next boss hit or the next few seconds until both of you can be fully revived is acceptable.

So that’s why I am apprehensive about removing any sort of CC resistance COMPLETELY from bosses. Between the downed state and being able to fully manipulate and control a boss, you could break encounters to the point where you have very little risk of actually dying.

If you run past monsters and they leash, I wouldn’t consider it an exploit.

If you are jumping up or around walls to get to areas that would not normally be accessible without clearing things, I think you’re tip-toeing into exploit territory.

It’s a very fine distinction, but it’s there. I don’t know if it’s punishable by Arena Net, but it’s certainly enough to warrant them looking into and fixing. And when something seems big enough to warrant fixing in a timely fashion, it is questionable to do.

It is irrelevant, so I am wondering why you are trying so hard to make a point of it?

I can see a few motivations for this. You want to clear everything. That’s fine. There are some groups that did things in a way that I did not agree with, so I left them, courteously, as soon as we completed the dungeon. Or you are so immersed in the Guild Wars 2 world that you don’t like it when something feels broken.

In response to the second reason of things feeling broken, tough. A lot of the dungeons have mechanics that are broken. I’m not talking about, “Oh, I can’t dodge this! I keep dying!” broken. I’m talking about broken broken, as in not working broken. If this is your motivation, I can understand it, but I believe Arena Net needs to fix the broken broken things first. I applaud you for being so into the world.

Now, if you want to clear everything and force everyone to clear everything as well, we have a problem. Because you’re trying to force your way of playing onto others. As I have stated, I have cleared and not cleared things. It makes little difference. You have mentioned that the time saved or the time lost is irrelevant. You are essentially becoming the elitist you hate.

It happens.

It generally means dungeons are slightly broken for the time being. For your own sanity, I would suggest waiting until that’s not the case.

Did you skip the part where I said clearing everything only takes an extra 5-10 minutes?

Skipping content is a gamble, because if one person doesn’t make it through and you can’t resurrect them, you lose the time you would have saved if the skipping were successful.

Or are you just wanting to rant, because I could let you do that if you want.

Guild Wars 2 does have the trinity, but it’s a slightly less restrictive one.

You can have tanks or support that makes everyone feel tanky. They also do fairly decent damage.

TANKS/HEALERS/DPS → CONTROL/SUPPORT/DAMAGE.

It’s a pretentious statement to try to say this is new and interesting, but the main change is that you don’t have to have a CONTROL or SUPPORT to be successful in a group. It sure helps though.

If you want a tank, look for support warriors or guardians. If you want healers, look for water elementalists or support… guardians… Almost all of the classes have CC of some sort.

The trinity is still there. It’s just different and doesn’t restrict parties to absolutely NEEDING any one of them.

For groups that had already been there, we ran past things, and I became incredibly efficient at guiding people through.

For groups that had not, we cleared everything. It honestly only takes 5-10 minutes. The only offender would be the three worms in the hallway, but there are enough Volatile Blossoms that I don’t believe I’ve had a group ever wipe there, even groups that just hit 80 and were completely new to the zone.

Your mileage may vary though. By the time I grouped with the fresh 80s that were new to Twilight Arbor, I already had 40 or so runs under my belt, so I could guide them with my eyes closed.

Like I said, it would be incredibly fun to be able to manipulate bosses in such a way, but the encounters will seem broken if you don’t run the risk of getting hit at all.

I don’t agree with the current system of Stability buff until X amount of CCs. If there is any mechanic necessary in order to help with dungeon balance, I agree with, after X amount of CCs, the boss gaining resistance to them for a short while.

I would not mind if they removed it completely, but I am definitely seeing how it could trivialize content. And maybe you want this. That’s fine. It’s just not what I want. I am sorry that we don’t agree.

I farmed a complete set with great effort, and I am fine with the token change.

If it means my friends will actually touch Guild Wars 2 again, awesome.

I may have jumped the gun, but your response seemed a bit too forward and earnest.

But I agree with your response to my statement. Partly, because it tells me what I already knew in order to make my original statement. Only partly.

I’m kidding. No offense intended.

Edit: Also, in regards to TA not having an easy route, it has two. Up-Up, and the slightly longer Forward-Up. It’s not as easy as the pre-patch CoF speed run, but I’ve never failed it, despite having farmed my set with mostly PUGs.

Edit 2: Wait. Should I have not let that slip?

I gave you a hint, and you still became that guy.

I don’t how what why I don’t even what just happened where am I?

I was being sarcastic. Just take the sentence I wrote before, “Sarcasm,” and take the opposite to be my intention.

I could see not having a CC buff be problematic with balancing—and let us not add to Arena Net’s balancing issues…—because a group full of CC that physically moves a boss would make a melee boss somewhat ineffective. The fix would be to give melee bosses a ranged attack with a higher cooldown, but even then…

For example, as a mesmer, I could immobilize a melee boss every 9.5 seconds and physically move the boss every 20-30? with Black Hole—or whatever the Focus skill is. And that’s just me. With 5 people manipulating a boss’ movements, the encounter would be INCREDIBLY FUN, but this might break it.