SevenLights.3052

Thank you for all your help. It is welcome and appreciated. 👍 For what is worth, the first thing I did after the fight was to check posts and videos from other players, and with that I found confirmation that there where others struggling with it. What I can say, in sum of what I presented here, is: » Discernment and visibility are decisive. While I was dealing with the chaotic unknown brought upon by this encounter, I had no resources to rise above it, and I ultimately felt I had no solutions. » As a meaningful example, the red icon was invisible to me (because I was overwhelmed by everything), and I simply did not know that such a telegraph even existed, or that I could dodge out of the attack that follows it. I would say that the game could have delivered some information on this, or maybe I missed it along the way. » After the Jade Construct spawned, there were at least two occasions where I was teleporting back into the room (after revival), and spawned on top of chains of CC (all abilities on CD) that did not even allow me to get up again. It was very stressful and draining. Maybe it was it all due to my inability and inexperience, or maybe the game could do a much better job in presenting and clarifying its own language. Cheers

Let us examine the facts then, to see which are mine, which are yours, and which are real. You say that the game exposes players to what they need, fully preparing them to address this fight on their first try. What do you mean? I have felt no such exposure or preparation. If you mean the red circles, I have been minding them since I have started playing this game. If you mean the mechanics of throwing stuff to break shields, it is present since much earlier and I had no problem with it. I did not feel I was being exposed or learning anything new throughout LS3, or if I did, I went through it easily and did not even register it. I am saying that the following is abruptly presented: » Fighting in a very small space, in a chaotic environment, bombed by chains of CC. This cannot be learned, as the patterns need to be understood and addressed during the fight. It was also present with an unprecedented level of intensity, due to its rythm, the size of the room, and the added Veteran Jade Construct (which will certainly spawn on any player's first blind try). » The only way to deliver damage to the boss with some level of consistency is to go into melee (and, even there, things get very chaotic with the added mob). Where else was this introduced? I have no recollection of any fight I could not solve (at least partially) from range. » The need to adjust the camera is also a good point, as I do not recall any previous occasion where it was as important as in this fight. Are these impossible to consider, to handle, or to learn? Of course not. Your video shows that all this can be solved in a clean and elegant way, by an experienced player. Is it a good idea to ask all this from someone doing this fight for the first time? My answer is clearly no. It is a horrible idea. To me, it seems very meaningful that, in the text description of your video we can read, and I quote: " As with the last demonstration of the Eater of Souls, Confessor Caudecus has mechanics which favor strong damage. The shield phase is more annoying than it is dangerous, as you can easily just walk around avoiding the orange circles while throwing bloodstone to weaken the shield. This is just smoke and mirrors. The tricky part about this fight is that it will return to the shield phase if you fail to kill the boss in time. If this drags on for too long, a veteran jade construct will spawn in the room and things get a bit more interesting! This is the story equivalent of a soft enrage timer. While burning in a single phase is ideal to avoid the tedium of multiple shield phases, it is critical that you at least muster enough damage during your burns to avoid a construct spawning. When this occurs the fight becomes significantly more difficult as the risk of being chain-CC'd to death is high. So, be sure to bring an aggressive enough build to this fight! " So, there is a tricky part, and if you fail to kill the boss in time the fight becomes significantly more difficult as the risk of being chain-CC'd to death is high. It is easy to say that the mechanics are nothing special (as per your latest post), when you already know them from before. However, the text to your own video seems to describe otherwise. Without prior knowledge of the details and timing to this fight, dropped inside an unknown bubble of hard to read chaotic effects, the common player is heavily penalized into a stressful CC chain nightmare, the likes of which are unseen in any previous fight. So, and again, in my opinion, such content is a disgrace, it lacks the simple common sense to consider the common player's ability to handle it, and its existence causes more harm than good.

I disagree. There is nothing is LS3 that offers any meaningful preparation, or scaling up, or hint, to what that fight is. Nothing. No environment with such a very small enclosed space, multiple sources of chained CC, leading to an obscure solution of fighting in closer quarters (which, btw, gets invalidated by the presence of the added mob). Furthermore, I also disagree that it is a question of learning anything, and specially so through the story line, as the fight is simply badly designed, and inconsistent with the type of content from where it arises. As for the context, two examples: » Instead of the mostly boring and meaningless chattering that is too frequent in the story, something might be included to describe the incoming bosses in how they fight. This would result in a state of awareness that would connect players to the dialogues, rewarding them with clues on how to better address difficult fights. » If I was about to participate in a Raid for the first time, I would be expecting hard content. My mood is very different when I am in story mode, where fights are mostly boring or moderately interesting, and a silly bomb of CC explosions comes crashing down, out of nowhere, establishing a sudden and ugly shift in what needs to be done to address it. In my opinion, it is badly designed and it is horrible content. Period. I can accept that you and others have different opinions, and I can also say that those opinions were formed from a different stand point than doing it for the first time, with, what I consider to be, a normal/average level of game experience. Something could also be said about a given class being more or less viable to the fight, but I would argue that story content needs to be compatible with all classes, while using an average viable build.

The difficulty of the fight is, of course, relative, to the player who is fighting it. So, to me, the fight was quite hard, and extremely annoying. Several factors contributed to this: » Usually I approach any unknown fight from range first, to somehow determine what I am up against, and progressively adapt to solve it. I could not do it in this fight, because there is no space. At the same time, the mechanics forced me into the outer circle, to grab the stuff that breaks the shield, and I had no visibility or discernement to evaluate if melee was a better option. » As you well say, this fight demands many things from the player. And it does so abruptely and completely out of context. There is nothing in the previous story line that comes anywhere near to what it is asked from the player here. In my opinion, this sudden shift is a very bad thing to have in the game, and a very bad call from the developers. If you really want to include something like this in the story line of the game, you need to do it gradually, and create a context that somehow invites the player into a different level of awareness. Otherwise, it is more a griefing factor than a healthy challenge. It is my honest opinion. Would like to add that I am happy to see how different opinions are coexisting in this discussion, creating clarity, depth and understanding. Thank you all for your messages and your presence!

Thank you for your replies. 👍 As I described earlier, the fight with Caudecus stood out, in my experience, as being much worse than all others, to the point of being extremely annoying. In my opinion, there are much better ways of scaling up difficulty, if that was the intention. I am not worried about learning to handle this fight. What moves me here is the perspective that, as part of the story, it should be delivered taking in consideration its impact on someone who is doing it for the first time. It is clear to me that fights such as these will generally drive players away much faster and decisively than any easy content. Thus my initiative to post. Btw, if it was nerfed/changed before, that does mean that its original conception was recognized as being flawed (and I would argue that it still is). Having said this, I also dislike the boring, long and meaningless fights that are delivered along the story instances. Would not be my priority in terms of what to improve first though. And since I am here, here is some further feedback on two other aspects: » I have found the multi layer maps of the HoT expansion to be extremely annoying. Love the music, love the environment, can live with the density of mobs, but very much dislike the complexity of the maps. Went through them with no mounts, anyway, because I want to play through the original story line, but it was painful and, in this particular aspect, very unrewarding. » I have recently been through the "Lost Spirit" stuff in a PoF story instance, and I found it completely empty of purpose. A walking simulator, and a detour to the story where I found nothing meaningful or fun. Again I say: I am mostly having a great time with the game. This is simply my way of underlining stuff that stands out as strangely out of place to me, regarding most other aspects of the game and its global approach.

Thank you for your post. 👍 It shows that the fight can be made easy, by knowing its mechanics beforehand, and even easier by using a post LW3 spec (with high level of experience). I appreciate the visibility it offers, and how it shows that, by going deeper into the game, much can be learned and understood. My opening post, however, comes from the perspective of a player who does not have your level of experience, and does not know the fight, which means: - mechanics are learned and executed on the run - The Jade Construct will spawn - visibility over everything that is happening is very low As someone who is playing LW3 for the first time, my opinion is that this fight is badly designed, and is bad for the game, penalizing its new players with horrible content. If I want to beat dungeons and raids, my predisposition is different, and I will study the challenge to eventually adapt and overcome it. However, if I am in story mode, I quite dislike being forced into such content.

Greetings, I have recently completed the Caudecus fight in LW3, and have decided to share my opinion about it. Although I have been finding some of the LW boss fights quite annoying (while also quite liking some others), I was mostly able to figure them out on the run, and, for the most part, finish them on my first try. Generally speaking, on those bad experiences, I believe that the fight mechanics should have been made more clear, although, on some occasions, I did find it rewarding to discover the solution by myself. All in all, I think some obvious improvements could be made to make them more enjoyable. In my experience, the Caudecus fight sets itself apart from all the previous ones, in a very bad way. It happens inside a small room, that gets flooded by spells and ability effects, so much so that I was often losing track of my mouse pointer. Furthermore, the rythm with which I was having to dodge, break stuns, and execute the needed mechanics kept me from delivering damage for extended periods of time, making the fight long, chaotic and extremely annoying. In my perspective, since this fight is inside the main story, it should be possible to enjoy it with any class (with a viable build), and without any prior knowledge on it. As it stands, I found it a nightmarish mess, with no fun in it. Btw, I am returning to GW2 after a few years away, and mostly having a great time with the game. Cheers