Originally posted by drakaena

Originally posted by Aerowyn

Originally posted by drakaena
I often play early in the morning before work and will be the only person doing a DE. Unless it ends in a champion they are all very easy and extremely soloable. Only diff is they take a little longer.

guess you are just to pro for me and the rest of my friends then because we have ran into many many challenging events so far.. far more challenging than basic quests in other MMOs. Not to the point you are ripping your hair out obviously but challenging for basic MMO questing for sure.

I really can't think of challenging DE I've encountered. Between my last post and this one I solo'd two stages of a DE and then got the champion to 1/2 health before a warrior showed up to help finish it off. 

It's not hard. It's just not. I know that is subjective but that's my opinion. And I don't pretend to be some pro player. Here's a tip though... spec into aoe.

like said above I'm comparing this to basic MMO questing.. not saying they are original ninja gaiden hard or anything. But compared to basic MMO quests I find them more fun and challenging.. but like you said it's subjective and depends on the player

Originally posted by Aerowyn

Originally posted by drakaena

Originally posted by Aerowyn

Originally posted by drakaena
I often play early in the morning before work and will be the only person doing a DE. Unless it ends in a champion they are all very easy and extremely soloable. Only diff is they take a little longer.

guess you are just to pro for me and the rest of my friends then because we have ran into many many challenging events so far.. far more challenging than basic quests in other MMOs. Not to the point you are ripping your hair out obviously but challenging for basic MMO questing for sure.

I really can't think of challenging DE I've encountered. Between my last post and this one I solo'd two stages of a DE and then got the champion to 1/2 health before a warrior showed up to help finish it off. 

It's not hard. It's just not. I know that is subjective but that's my opinion. And I don't pretend to be some pro player. Here's a tip though... spec into aoe.

like said above I'm comparing this to basic MMO questing.. not saying they are original ninja gaiden hard or anything. But compared to basic MMO quests I find them more fun and challenging.. but like you said it's subjective and depends on the player

It's definitely the most fun I've ever had questing in a themepark MMO. No doubt. I wouldn't play it everyday if I didn't like it.

Only challenging aspect of GW2 is dungeons. . So i run dungeons when i can and mostly stick to PVP. I do PVE on ocassions but not that fond of it;) i mostly just stand with the zerg, put ability on auto attack, make a sandwich, come back and people are still killing the boss.

Happened to me today in Field Of ruins where you kill underwater crystal shark. That was some boring PVE.

Originally posted by drakaena

 

It's definitely the most fun I've ever had questing in a themepark MMO. No doubt. I wouldn't play it everyday if I didn't like it.

and i think that's all that matters then:)

PvE = Very Easy. Only difficulty comes from being mobbed typically. Outside dodge, it has one of the simplest systems I've seen, even easier then most dungeon crawlers in terms of skill use and the like outside of some classes/weapons being a bit harder.

Dungeons = Cheap hard, otherwise decent. Basically much of the difficulty isn't about being hard, its about being as cheap as possible. CC does help with this to some degree, though in the end that cc will run out, you won't have dodging to do and your just screwed. Outside of that, they aren't bad. I honestly found trash to be much harder then any of the bosses. Bosses are relatively easy in most cases.

WvW = I didn't like it. Zerg Verse Zerg is all it is. Its pretty much what open world pvp was about. With a guild it CAN be a little better but I just really don't see much appeal either way.

sPvP = Decent. Its just Battlegrounds (to name a popular name for it) with the same few scenarios repeating. None of them really stick out to me and it can get boring relatively quick. I can see how it can be taken to be competative but right now it still needs work. Still, if done tornament style, it can be a fair challenge, otherwise its all about luck of the team.

Crafting = Strong point, particularly if your looking at cooking. The biggest issue is mats are so rediculously hard to get, and you need LOTS of them. It would be fine if this had some kind of curve, but it starts at level 1, then suddenly gets a lot easier, then suddenly a lot harder. Its all over the place. Difficulty to get mats really detracts from the crafting system and the discovery system outside cooking just seems to unexplored and toyed with. Cooking = Good, other professions = Meh. Di

Overall Challenge = Easy.

The game itself is pretty simple and very easy to play. Sure, dodging can play some part, but I just don't see much in terms of it being hard. Dodging basically replaces more complex combat and a lot of the difficulty you do see you can only counter so many times or simply you stand no chance against it. The only time I felt difficulty was actually done right was the last boss of AC where it really did seem to promote skill based play, though the rest of the dungeon it was about cheesy attempts to get you that you could only stop so many times.

Don't get me wrong, I do have fun, but its not something that challenges me. Challenge =/= cheap, and while it doesn't have the Diablo 3 cheapness applied to it, its not all that far off at times. 

Originally posted by Aerowyn

Originally posted by drakaena

 

It's definitely the most fun I've ever had questing in a themepark MMO. No doubt. I wouldn't play it everyday if I didn't like it.

and i think that's all that matters then:)

True but the topic is about challenging content. I'd say recent themeparks like SWTOR and Rift were more challenging from a questing perspective (didn't play TSW but imagine it was tougher as well). You had to be more aware of your surroundings. I seriously can't die in GW2 unless it's a champion or higher. It's just too easy to avoid regular mobs or pile them up and aoe.

Originally posted by TwoThreeFour

Originally posted by Aerowyn

I'd say if they scaled them even more people would complain they are getting one-shotted left and right all the time.. has to be some sort of balance. Right now and every MMO has the issue the zones just have to many people in them. Give it a couple weeks it will spread out a bit and alt leveling will be much more enjoyable if you aren't enjoying it because of the amount of people and the events feeling to "zergy".

Scaling does not necessarely mean that each enemy does more damage with single attacks. They can also increase the amount of enemies and increase the AoE skills the Boss does and decrease the cooldown timer for them.

Not to butt in, but that is already being done to it's limit.

Go to some of the events in places like Orr, or outside the endgame dungeons, and you'll see so many enemies spawning to the events that the game can't even load them all at the same time. It doesn't even make the event any harder, tbh.

The simple truth is that once you get a critical mass of players in one area, it doesn't matter what the event is. It becomes trivial. This isn't so much a problem with the game mechanics, as it is physics. Once events scale passed what a few people can handle, it automatically turns into an AoE-fest. Once it scales further than that, it turns into a zergy AoE fest. Regardless of the game; you toss enough bombs at something, it doesn't matter what's being thrown at you, it's dead.

The only real way to 'fix' a situation like this is to either wait and try and pursuade the population to spread out (which they are doing right now), or to make the game more solo-oriented (which all other MMOs have been doing). Of course, this is really only an issue if you are actively following the zerg around. In each zone I've been in there is typically (at most) 1 main group of players that are roaming. The rest of the zone is occupied by solo players, or small groups. The content is definitely best experienced in small-medium sized groups, with a few exceptions.

Originally posted by drakaena

Originally posted by Aerowyn

Originally posted by drakaena

 

It's definitely the most fun I've ever had questing in a themepark MMO. No doubt. I wouldn't play it everyday if I didn't like it.

and i think that's all that matters then:)

True but the topic is about challenging content. I'd say recent themeparks like SWTOR and Rift were more challenging from a questing perspective (didn't play TSW but imagine it was tougher as well). You had to be more aware of your surroundings. I seriously can't die in GW2 unless it's a champion or higher. It's just too easy to avoid regular mobs or pile them up and aoe.

really how so? i found swtor so mind numbingly easy I was falling asleep during basic PVE questing... in Rift I enjoyed AOE farming with my cleric inq/just doing soul drain.. but I could easily pull 20+ mobs and blast them all down in seconds.. hardly any challenge at all imho. I find GW2 you have to be more aware of your surroundings way more than the two games you mentioned even specced for AOE.

Dunno about long-term.

I got bored with the game at lv45 after facerolling on the keyboard in a zergfest.

Maybe, just maybe, GW2 wasn't ever even intended to be played like a sub based game.

Maybe it was designed to be played for a bit, put down for a little while and returned to at a later time.

Originally posted by GeezerGamer

Maybe, just maybe, GW2 wasn't ever even intended to be played like a sub based game.

Maybe it was designed to be played for a bit, put down for a little while and returned to at a later time.

I said that after BWE2 and was flamed on this site unmercilessly lol

Originally posted by GeezerGamer

Maybe, just maybe, GW2 wasn't ever even intended to be played like a sub based game.

Maybe it was designed to be played for a bit, put down for a little while and returned to at a later time.

Game is easy and simplfied on purpose to sell millions of copies. I don't know people act so surprised. 

All that matters is that you are having fun.  

That you don't have to justify logging into the game, you do it because you want to.

If you aren't having fun, why are you even logging into the game?  To find more reasons why your life has no meaning?

No one really cares that you don't like the game.  If they like it, they're playing it.  You telling them the sky is red doesn't make it red to them.  On the flipside, if they don't like the game, no amount of postulating is going to change their mind either.

These forums are nothing more than arguments for arguments sake... they change nothing... but do fill the internet with more drivel.  To each his own.

Originally posted by Aerowyn

Originally posted by drakaena

Originally posted by Aerowyn

Originally posted by drakaena

 

It's definitely the most fun I've ever had questing in a themepark MMO. No doubt. I wouldn't play it everyday if I didn't like it.

and i think that's all that matters then:)

True but the topic is about challenging content. I'd say recent themeparks like SWTOR and Rift were more challenging from a questing perspective (didn't play TSW but imagine it was tougher as well). You had to be more aware of your surroundings. I seriously can't die in GW2 unless it's a champion or higher. It's just too easy to avoid regular mobs or pile them up and aoe.

really how so? i found swtor so mind numbingly easy I was falling asleep during basic PVE questing... in Rift I enjoyed AOE farming with my cleric inq/just doing soul drain.. but I could easily pull 20+ mobs and blast them all down in seconds.. hardly any challenge at all imho. I find GW2 you have to be more aware of your surrounds way more than the two games you mentioned even specced for AOE.

Just to be clear I didn't like either SWTOR or Rift. I like GW2 for the most part. It just felt like in those games I had to watch what I was aggroing or I could become overwhelmed and die. In GW2 it doesn't matter how many reg mobs I aggro... I can easily run away or stack and aoe. 

Example: There's a POI inside a cave. I don't need to fight my way through countless mobs. I can just run right through them and never worry about dying. In other games I would die doing that unless I out leveled or out geared the content.

Originally posted by aesperus

Originally posted by TwoThreeFour

Originally posted by Aerowyn

I'd say if they scaled them even more people would complain they are getting one-shotted left and right all the time.. has to be some sort of balance. Right now and every MMO has the issue the zones just have to many people in them. Give it a couple weeks it will spread out a bit and alt leveling will be much more enjoyable if you aren't enjoying it because of the amount of people and the events feeling to "zergy".

Scaling does not necessarely mean that each enemy does more damage with single attacks. They can also increase the amount of enemies and increase the AoE skills the Boss does and decrease the cooldown timer for them.

Not to butt in, but that is already being done to it's limit.

Go to some of the events in places like Orr, or outside the endgame dungeons, and you'll see so many enemies spawning to the events that the game can't even load them all at the same time. It doesn't even make the event any harder, tbh.

The simple truth is that once you get a critical mass of players in one area, it doesn't matter what the event is. It becomes trivial. This isn't so much a problem with the game mechanics, as it is physics. Once events scale passed what a few people can handle, it automatically turns into an AoE-fest. Once it scales further than that, it turns into a zergy AoE fest. Regardless of the game; you toss enough bombs at something, it doesn't matter what's being thrown at you, it's dead.

The only real way to 'fix' a situation like this is to either wait and try and pursuade the population to spread out (which they are doing right now), or to make the game more solo-oriented (which all other MMOs have been doing). Of course, this is really only an issue if you are actively following the zerg around. In each zone I've been in there is typically (at most) 1 main group of players that are roaming. The rest of the zone is occupied by solo players, or small groups. The content is definitely best experienced in small-medium sized groups, with a few exceptions.

i agree there really is no good "fix" for the massive amunts of people in each zone.. opening new servers as seen in the past is not a good solution so basically it just needs to spread out(which like you said it's doing already) and it will get better as far as constant oversaturation of people in every event over time.

Originally posted by aesperus

Originally posted by TwoThreeFour

Originally posted by Aerowyn

I'd say if they scaled them even more people would complain they are getting one-shotted left and right all the time.. has to be some sort of balance. Right now and every MMO has the issue the zones just have to many people in them. Give it a couple weeks it will spread out a bit and alt leveling will be much more enjoyable if you aren't enjoying it because of the amount of people and the events feeling to "zergy".

Scaling does not necessarely mean that each enemy does more damage with single attacks. They can also increase the amount of enemies and increase the AoE skills the Boss does and decrease the cooldown timer for them.

Not to butt in, but that is already being done to it's limit.

Go to some of the events in places like Orr, or outside the endgame dungeons, and you'll see so many enemies spawning to the events that the game can't even load them all at the same time. It doesn't even make the event any harder, tbh.

The simple truth is that once you get a critical mass of players in one area, it doesn't matter what the event is. It becomes trivial. This isn't so much a problem with the game mechanics, as it is physics. Once events scale passed what a few people can handle, it automatically turns into an AoE-fest. Once it scales further than that, it turns into a zergy AoE fest. Regardless of the game; you toss enough bombs at something, it doesn't matter what's being thrown at you, it's dead.

The only real way to 'fix' a situation like this is to either wait and try and pursuade the population to spread out (which they are doing right now), or to make the game more solo-oriented (which all other MMOs have been doing). Of course, this is really only an issue if you are actively following the zerg around. In each zone I've been in there is typically (at most) 1 main group of players that are roaming. The rest of the zone is occupied by solo players, or small groups. The content is definitely best experienced in small-medium sized groups, with a few exceptions.

They can give certain mobs AoE protection,etc, to make it more desirable for people to do 1 on 1 skills rather than just do full AoE. Designing content to scale for large amounts of people is a difficult task indeed. You are though right that at a certain point you can't spawn more enemies due to hardware limitation, but there are still other methods out there.

Originally posted by drakaena

Originally posted by Aerowyn

Originally posted by drakaena

Originally posted by Aerowyn

Originally posted by drakaena

 

It's definitely the most fun I've ever had questing in a themepark MMO. No doubt. I wouldn't play it everyday if I didn't like it.

and i think that's all that matters then:)

True but the topic is about challenging content. I'd say recent themeparks like SWTOR and Rift were more challenging from a questing perspective (didn't play TSW but imagine it was tougher as well). You had to be more aware of your surroundings. I seriously can't die in GW2 unless it's a champion or higher. It's just too easy to avoid regular mobs or pile them up and aoe.

really how so? i found swtor so mind numbingly easy I was falling asleep during basic PVE questing... in Rift I enjoyed AOE farming with my cleric inq/just doing soul drain.. but I could easily pull 20+ mobs and blast them all down in seconds.. hardly any challenge at all imho. I find GW2 you have to be more aware of your surrounds way more than the two games you mentioned even specced for AOE.

Just to be clear I didn't like either SWTOR or Rift. I like GW2 for the most part. It just felt like in those games I had to watch what I was aggroing or I could become overwhelmed and die. In GW2 it doesn't matter how many reg mobs I aggro... I can easily run away or stack and aoe. 

Example: There's a POI inside a cave. I don't need to fight my way through countless mobs. I can just run right through them and never worry about dying. In other games I would die doing that unless I out leveled or out geared the content.

how high have you gotten? i found higher I go mobs start doing more CC and conditions making it a bit harder to just run away all the time.. unless you are specced well enough to break all that CC and have some movement buffs.. really depends on class and spec. I'd try ele if I get more than a couple regular mobs on me and can't get away or burst them down I'm dead(espeically if many are ranged mobs)

Don't get me wrong, I like the game and am having a lot of fun. But I am a very casual player, not more than an hour or two a day, maybe twice that on Sat and Sunday, and I am levelling slow, playing only with my wife and a couple rl friends at the moment and overall really having a good time. 

However, I can tell you right now, there is no way I will be playing this game in 6 months.  I am half way through learning my skills, and am already kinda tired of WvWvW (I will get flamed for this, but it is just not "fun" enough to keep me coming back and there is no real sense of progression for me), and whether it was Anets intent or not, the zerg fests make DEs feel absolutely no different from the RIFTs which so many people said they were so much better than. I have yet to experience that difference myself. 

Ironically, it might be the game's success that makes it easy. If the populations were much lower, these DEs would have a better chance to fail, and would be very challenging. As it is, I have yet to see a single DE failure of the first wave. All successful the first time with a massive zerg.  With DEs being such a key part of open world pve, I would like to see them a bit more brutal.

Originally posted by Naral

Don't get me wrong, I like the game and am having a lot of fun. But I am a very casual player, not more than an hour or two a day, maybe twice that on Sat and Sunday, and I am levelling slow, playing only with my wife and a couple rl friends at the moment and overall really having a good time. 

However, I can tell you right now, there is no way I will be playing this game in 6 months.  I am half way through learning my skills, and am already kinda tired of WvWvW (I will get flamed for this, but it is just not "fun" enough to keep me coming back and there is no real sense of progression for me), and whether it was Anets intent or not, the zerg fests make DEs feel absolutely no different from the RIFTs which so many people said they were so much better than. I have yet to experience that difference myself. 

Ironically, it might be the game's success that makes it easy. If the populations were much lower, these DEs would have a better chance to fail, and would be very challenging. As it is, I have yet to see a single DE failure of the first wave. All successful the first time with a massive zerg.  With DEs being such a key part of open world pve, I would like to see them a bit more brutal.

I'll say GW2 DE's feel more organic to the world then Rift's DE's did. But imo there was more of a Risk factor in Rift's DE's. Some of them actually took coordination and teamplay.

Originally posted by Aerowyn

Originally posted by drakaena

*snip*

True but the topic is about challenging content. I'd say recent themeparks like SWTOR and Rift were more challenging from a questing perspective (didn't play TSW but imagine it was tougher as well). You had to be more aware of your surroundings. I seriously can't die in GW2 unless it's a champion or higher. It's just too easy to avoid regular mobs or pile them up and aoe.

really how so? i found swtor so mind numbingly easy I was falling asleep during basic PVE questing... in Rift I enjoyed AOE farming with my cleric inq/just doing soul drain.. but I could easily pull 20+ mobs and blast them all down in seconds.. hardly any challenge at all imho. I find GW2 you have to be more aware of your surroundings way more than the two games you mentioned even specced for AOE.

Now who could forget the Cleric's Duracell spec. AOE farming like a boss.

Funny thing is that I can almost do the same thing in GW2, with the Hybrid Elementalist spec I've made. However I mainly AOE farm when side-kicked down and it simply doesn't work on some mobs with punishing CCs and AOEs.