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Some (hopefully) constructive criticism of the new meta.


Adotiln Urthadar.1823

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So we just got a new Claw of Jormag fight released, as well as the assault on the frost citadel, so I thought I’d give a bit of (hopefully) constructive feedback on the different parts of the meta, though it will mostly be negative I think.

I think there is a lot to enjoy about the earlier parts of the attack on the citadel. The preparation is fairly standard stuff, but there are a few cool things once inside.The Phalanx design is good – creating a barrier to players that needs cc to break, while artillery (ice giants) and snipers shoot over them is a nice addition and very thematically interesting. The blog post mentioned the ability to create more cinematic moments by having more control over the players’ positioning (and thus camera) and this comes into effect for the room with the tank when it slowly rolls into view as we engage the frost legion forces.

After this though, it feels like it starts to go downhill. The blood collection room is a decent place for a repeated fight with an icebrood construct, but the experience is ruined by the huge numbers of mobs that spawn. Returning to the blog post, there was a mention of “innovating with player roles” that I’m guessing was supposed to come into play a bit here? If the intent was to have some players dealing with the trash mobs though, the scaling completely thwarts this – the additional enemies in this room are FAR too tanky to be worth the time killing them (they usually take almost as long to kill as the icebrood construct itself). So the experience here is one of being constantly bounced around between a million different knockbacks that no amount of stability will prevent. Between the ice giants and the catapults (which are easy to destroy, but are rebuilt by the engineers almost instantly, and the engineers are far too tanky to bother killing) you’re barely even able to fight the boss.

Things don’t improve after this – you run down a long corridor filled with enemies that aren’t worth the time to kill but cause serious problems to anyone behind the zerg – and out into the new Claw fight.

Visually, this is a very nice arena, with the Claw looming imposingly above the battlefield and pelting damage down upon players. Unfortunately, this is all just set dressing. As the cannon scraps are not instanced, a handful of players instantly grab them and leave everyone else with nothing to do. It took me a couple of runs to even realise where the cannon scraps appeared as they were gone so quickly. To make matters worse, some of the Claw’s attacks are seriously overtuned. The large “ice bomb” that covers an area in frost looks great, but the huge size of it, and constant ticks of chill and damage just cut off massive areas of the arena (that your current objective might be inside), and risk “trapping” players in the AoE with no real recourse. Chill is such an oppressive condition it feels needlessly harsh to have it applied so frequently. The Claw also has an “ice laser” attack (that once again, looks great) but the AoE for this ability appears practically the same moment that the attack hits, and the damage is enough to instantly down most players – I’ve seen this take out half a squad before, with no way to have prevented it.

In contrast to the earlier encounters in the Citadel, the direction is also pretty lacking here: both times the Claw is shot off its perch, it happens the very second the event concludes. Time in which players are usually ressing each other and picking up loot. As such after a fair few runs of the meta, I had to remind myself to consciously look at the Claw, as I realised I’d never actually watched it be shot off.

Side note: While I believe the bounty system from PoF has a lot of potential, it feels like too often the ley instabilities are just slapped on a basic mob rather than create something interesting to fight. By contrast, the addition of a couple of novel attacks as well as the instabilities on each of the tribunes makes them feel much more engaging in my opinion.

The final fight on the Claw then feels very disappointing. As someone who enjoyed the Drakkar fight, this felt both similar and yet far less interesting.The “headline” attack from the claw is to push back players and then to release a chilling ice breath that players are supposed to hide from behind boulders. In practice though, neither of these attacks is anywhere close to threatening enough to waste time not DPSing, so squads just completely ignore it and revive anyone who gets downed by the ice breath (which is rare). What IS dangerous, however, is the multitude of mobs that spawn at the back of the arena who are ready to instantly nuke any players unfortunate enough to try playing the encounter the way it was intended.When the Claw finally breaks free, it becomes even less threatening as all it does at this point is paw aimlessly at the ground vaguely near the squad, causing the entire fight to just fizzle to a close.

I feel that most of the problems I have with both the frost citadel and Claw encounters are that the mechanics don’t reward you for completing them: killing extra mobs in the citadel is often a waste of time; avoiding the claw’s breath attack isn’t important and just takes time away from attacking the boss, etc. As such the feeling of these fights is such that the mechanics often feel like they’re just an irritation, rather than part of the encounter. In the case of the citadel icebrood construct, this feels like just a case of poor tuning/scaling. The Claw fight is disappointing because the game has done many of the same things before, and much better – the original claw fight is better directed, Drakkar is more engaging to fight, the Vinewrath even has a better “hide behind the walls” mechanic.

There is a lot of good stuff about these encounters, so I hope this comes across as genuine feedback rather than an attack.

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The other issue is the visual noise (yeah I know Anet don't care and wont acknowledge it and will continue to stack the problem regardless). There's no point designing mechanics if the whole play area is too busy to see what is going on.

The original Claw fight isn't out of this World, but it is well paced and clear. These new graphical environment effects since PoF/LS4 on top of the flashing effects from skills going off, is just hampering fights and severly reducing the overall quality of the experience.

Slow the fight down (after you've reduced the length of tha preceeding meta to a sensible level), pull back on the effects and design clear and readable mechanics like you used to. Drakkar wasn't great, but this has been a really poor execution compared what the teams have shown they have done in the past.

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@Adotiln Urthadar.1823 said:What IS dangerous, however, is the multitude of mobs that spawn at the back of the arena who are ready to instantly nuke any players unfortunate enough to try playing the encounter the way it was intended.

I agree completely on this, and I feel it's one of the greatest oversights of the fight design. Most of the other stuff you mentioned can just scale more intelligently, and it would solve the issue (currently skipped mobs die more easily, but also hit much harder - that double whammy would encourage us to actually deal with them as part of the encounter). Arguably the same could be done for the super dangerous mobs that luck near the rocks that are supposed to shield us from the Claw's push breath, but I believe it makes more sense for those mobs to hunt players who decide to ignore mechanics and stray away from the rocks.

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