Dragon's End is still massively overtuned and random

[Cyninja.2954]

5 minutes ago, mandala.8507 said:

I'm fairly certain "if more players did some critical self-evaluation and improvement" is an exact translation of "get good".

 

Oh no that part I did say, I was referring to your personal additions and suggestions which you decided to add.

 

Yes, I guess my position can be summarized as:

If more players decided to "get gud" just a little bit, instead of complaining on the forums, this meta would be a piece of cake. Plus the amount of time spent complaining is often far longer and more than actually just reflecting and actively deciding to try to get that little bit "better".

Edited December 19, 2022 by Cyninja.2954

[azorean.1850]

not Anet fault that people dont know how to play

[Healix.5819]

3 hours ago, vares.8457 said:

There are open world players that want a little bit more challenge. Why not have one event in the whole game for them?

Open world means playing with the people who happened to be there. Large scale challenging open world content doesn't work, since it ultimately turns into instanced content, which you'll find is the common suggestion here. They'd need to link the progress of all instances together to fake it being a true open world experience.

Open world challenges have to be designed around the fact that the few are carrying the many. The opposite just means the few either have to avoid the many, or are severely punished. If ArenaNet wants to go in this direction, they're going to have to implement a scoring system where you're ranked based on how far you get in something like Queen's Gauntlet, then aren't allowed to participate until you meet the minimum requirements (or you're not factored into scaling and get reduced/no rewards).

[Ashen.2907]

5 hours ago, mandala.8507 said:

, it's just clear from your responses you don't have the desire to engage in a discussion

As opposed to someone who posts a dishonest misrepresentation of others' opinions while claiming it as a translation?

Pot meet kettle.

[idpersona.3810]

24 minutes ago, azorean.1850 said:

not Anet fault that people dont know how to play

It actually is to a degree. There's a DPS check (albeit a relatively easy one) but no easy way for players to know what their DPS is. And certainly no way to know what's expected of them individually.
Now, they can go and practice as seems to be the consensus in general. But they have no reason to if they don't know there's a problem. Lots and lots of players have failed the meta with no idea what went wrong.
Could they do research and get "better" at their class? Sure. Is that what the majority of players expect to have to do in a game they play for fun? I don't know, but I feel like that probably isn't the case.

None of this has anything to do with my opinion of the meta btw. I don't think the majority of players actually know about benchmarks or that they're dealing so far under their potential damage.

[Silent.6137]

6 hours ago, mandala.8507 said:

I'm easily in the top 1% of players in this game when it comes to combat proficiency.

 

1 hour ago, mandala.8507 said:

I'm not overvaluing my skill

Making an unsubstantiated claim like that, you're definitely over-estimating your skill level. While it may be a possibility, how did you arrive at that conclusions? You have absolutely no way to compare yourself against the whole playerbase. The number of players you'll interact with even if you had played for 10 years will still be an extremely small %.

[Khisanth.2948]

10 hours ago, Dreams.3128 said:

I seem to be recalling people making this same exact argument for the Modremoth fight for..months in fact. Same issue, same argument, same complaint about it being too demanding, and now it is one of the easiest fights to do after all of the class powercreep and understanding mechanics. I swear I feel like the community simply repeats its history over and over again every time Anet implements something that makes the player actually work and not feel like some overpowered hero that can one shot everything.

There was Teq and Marionette long before Mordremoth

[Taclism.2406]

8 hours ago, azorean.1850 said:

not Anet fault that people dont know how to play

it literally is.
Its not that the average person dont want to learn at all, its that the progression curve and lackluster ingame tools / tutorials make this progression very linked to external websites that have a fraction of gw2's traffic. 

The average person doesn't go on forums , wikis or reddit. They chat with their guild/friends and thats about it. 
However the average person will do the game story, and you know what's the only meta story points you to do? DE 😕

[Blood Red Arachnid.2493]

To flex the system.  That's why I'm in favor of keeping it as is.  The GW2 combat system is quite amazing in what it can accomplish, as well as what is already in the game.  We've seen some great stuff on the smaller scale, where encounters can be more controlled, but some amazing things can happen in the larger scale, too.  It is unfortunate, however, that the developers are hamstrung by the players in these matters.  Great content often requires great players to complete it.

There's a line in the fight, said by Logan at around the half-way point: "The battle up top... I've never seen such bravery.  Oh Gods she's BACK!"  This line... well... I don't like it much, mostly because I think it is out of character for Logan to give us validation in the middle of the battle.  It also doesn't help that I've heard it 100 times by now.  However, that line takes on a completely different meaning if you're part of the first clear squads pre-nerf.  Nowadays you can reliably auto-attack the boss into defeat, but back in the earlier days you had to squeeze out as much DPS as possible to accommodate for all the deaths, bugs, and unknown abilities.  That line makes sense if you really are fighting tooth and nail to defeat Soo-Won.  It is very clear that this fight was intended to be more difficult than average, for undue praise is an insult.

These kinds of fights are put into the game to encourage people to get better at GW2, which will then let Anet design more engaging fights.  When I say "get better," this isn't just in reference to gearing up a toon or maximizing DPS.  Organizational skills and interpersonal interaction are very much part of the difficulty to be overcome.  For example, you may remember me as the Serpent's Ire guy.  The secret to how I would PUG-host pre-nerfs Serpent's Ire wasn't about maximizing DPS.  It was about figuring out how to gather all the players together and instruct them on how to do absurd levels of CCPS with every profession.  It involved me furiously typing for 10 minutes all the instructions, figuring out the best way to get players onto the right markers, picking the right times to host the event, etc.  This was all part of the difficulty of the event, much more so than it was fighting Ysshi Hassani and Pekt Rakt Grag.  

[Sobx.1758]

 Ok, fixed the post so you don't get conveniently preoccupied with the least relevant 2 words of the whole response:

21 hours ago, mandala.8507 said:

Translation of all the people arguing against further adjustments to this fight: "It's important we have some fights people aren't allowed to enjoy at their current investment level on the golden path. It doesn't matter that there are important collections and lore locked behind it, the game needs to ostracize certain players on purpose or else I won't enjoy it. The only thing I actually find fun about this meta is that some people struggle with it if they don't put in extra effort, despite them not wanting to and most likely just leaving the content for good after their first few fails. I'd rather no one play it than it be enjoyable for everyone."'

Really? That's what you want to do here? Ok then, translation of all the people arguing to further nerf the event: I just want to show up, press whatever (or not press, how dare you forcing me to do stuff?!) and get rewards no matter what.

Good new though, there's a type of games that will do it! Bad(??) news: it's called "autoclicker/idle game", not "action mmorpg".

21 hours ago, mandala.8507 said:

Nothing about the fight is challenging if you know what you're doing.

So you understand the players mostly require "understanding of what they're doing" in order to complete the event. And yet... here you are, arguing as if it's somehow a bad/huge requirement because what exactly? Because new players can't beeline into literally the latest meta event which is also a culmination point of the 10 years of existance of the game and simply succeed it by default? Tbh I struggle to see what point you think you're making with saying this here.

21 hours ago, mandala.8507 said:

People in this thread have already admitted they don't think the timer is tight and that it apparently doesn't matter, so change it.

As you said it yourself: if people understand what they're doing. Which isn't exactly a steep requirement for the last meta event of the game. So no, don't change it.

Edited December 20, 2022 by Sobx.1758

[Sobx.1758]

20 hours ago, Hauwlyn.8051 said:

Either you're completely incapable of putting yourself in someone else's shoes, or you believe humans have perfect perception, treat every information on a conscious level and have perfect memory.

So you're vouching for the game to explain stuff to the players better, but when it's clear the game already does it... it doesn't matter because people don't do everything consciously and don't have perfect memory. Are you even serious right now? 😉 You don't need to "have perfect perception" to read an explanation that pops up in the middle of your screen upon leveling up.

20 hours ago, Hauwlyn.8051 said:

Yeah, your stance is that people should improve, and the majority of the playerbase who joined when this game got the reputation of a casual MMO don't want to improve. They were fine with giving up on hardcore endgame content and just enjoy their routine in open world, but the demands of some unsatiable hardcores made it so the hardcore content treaded on their ground, and they're unhappy about it. That's it. Stop trying to force anyone to put in effort just because that is your way of playing the game. Accept that casual gaming is a thing on its own and not just a step towards eventually becoming hardcore, and that it's essential to this game.

No, my stance is that there's no issue with having a wider range of content, including its varying difficulty. If "you" don't want to improve then don't, I don't see how you'd suddenly stop enjoying the game because you won't do the rather limited content you don't enjoy anyways. Lets make it clear: I'm not the one that wants the whole game catering to myself here. This is not "their ground" the same way it's not "my ground". Stop trying to force whole OW content to be exactly like you want it, because the moment there's a LIMITED amount of harder content, you'll scream "this is my ground!".

"some unsatiable hardcores made it so the hardcore content treaded on their ground" -seriously, wow.

Edited December 20, 2022 by Sobx.1758

[mandala.8507]

2 hours ago, Sobx.1758 said:

 Ok, fixed the post so you don't get conveniently preoccupied with the least relevant 2 words of the whole response:

So, you removed the part of your comment where you admit you have no clue what I'm referring to when I say this content gatekeeps important and almost entirely unrelated content, which is the primary justification for why I think this meta should be more consistent to clear, and say you fixed your comment?

And the simply wild claim that, because I don't want to gatekeep other players from all the content tied to this meta, I want the game to be like cookie clicker or something still made the cut?

When I say the fight isn't challenging, I mean from an individual player perspective, and I say this to counter the idea that this fight is somehow added diversity in terms of difficulty of open world encounters. It's not. Tbh, the Weight of the World story instance is a harder fight from an individual player perspective than the DE meta. The DE meta has a high likelihood of failure because it's balanced around a more synergistic and coordinated playstyle than open world currently enables or quite frankly could ever organically support. Randomly tuning some open world encounters for organized, trinity-esque squads with streamlined, selfish dps builds paired with streamlined full support builds when no one is running around open world using those builds is just a poor read of how the game works. A complete lack of fundamental understanding of the design of gw2's dynamic open world. 

I'm tired of players lobbying for the game to be ubiquitously harder and then accusing everyone who doesn't want that of being bad or wanting everything for free, or whatever.

You've failed to understand that players of every disposition play MMOs, including Guild Wars 2, and you greatly undervalue those who don't care about the combat side of this game as much as you do. Your response belies your belief that players who exclusively value combat proficiency are superior and should be the primary, if not sole focus of the game. This is delusion.

[stormemperor.3745]

Pug life

[IAmNotMatthew.1058]

19 hours ago, Shadowmoon.7986 said:

I really need to check the forum archive, was the playerbase so entitled during teq, tt, tm and vw before HoT. All of those meta required organized group, and often failed, but i do not remember all the whining on the forum back then.

Is this a side effect of the covid lockdown? I understand we are in a great resigntion in RL, but this feel like bleed over into IG.

I don't remember this amount of complaining about Gerent/Tarir being extremely difficult when it was released even though it took like a week for the first success in Tarir and more than that for Gerent. 

[Cyninja.2954]

6 minutes ago, mandala.8507 said:

When I say the fight isn't challenging, I mean from an individual player perspective, and I say this to counter the idea that this fight is somehow added diversity in terms of difficulty of open world encounters. It's not.

True, but it is challenging enough from an individual perspective that it seems to cause issues. Imagine if this fight were actually challenging individually, then it would be near impossible for a random set of players, some of which maybe are only minimally competent.

6 minutes ago, mandala.8507 said:

Tbh, the Weight of the World story instance is a harder fight from an individual player perspective than the DE meta.

It's also balanced via endless respawns and story NPCs and no fail state.

6 minutes ago, mandala.8507 said:

The DE meta has a high likelihood of failure because it's balanced around a more synergistic and coordinated playstyle than open world currently enables or quite frankly could ever organically support.

The only synergy required is for many players is to do a little to contribute to the whole. That's as open world as it can get.

6 minutes ago, mandala.8507 said:

Randomly tuning some open world encounters for organized, trinity-esque squads with streamlined, selfish dps builds paired with streamlined full support builds when no one is running around open world using those builds is just a poor read of how the game works.

This extensive measure of preparation also leads to a very high success rate. That alone already shows that you are dealing and arguing in extremes. The meta is absolutely doable without going through these lengths. The reason players actually do is to counterbalance and safe guard against the fact that some players will under-perform. That is not the same as needing this sort of organization.

6 minutes ago, mandala.8507 said:

A complete lack of fundamental understanding of the design of gw2's dynamic open world. 

Open world has no common design. The most common design for the majority of the open world content is "let's make it scale but make sure enough players can out-scale it".

6 minutes ago, mandala.8507 said:

I'm tired of players lobbying for the game to be ubiquitously harder and then accusing everyone who doesn't want that of being bad or wanting everything for free, or whatever.

Some players want a scale of content and content difficulty. The developers are trying to oblige by adding scaling AND encouraging some minor development game-play wise. As Blood Red Arachnid.2493 put it: there needs to be some development on the lower end of the player base. The developers are putting in small speed-bumps here and there to encourage some development.

6 minutes ago, mandala.8507 said:

You've failed to understand that players of every disposition play MMOs, including Guild Wars 2, and you greatly undervalue those who don't care about the combat side of this game as much as you do. Your response belies your belief that players who exclusively value combat proficiency are superior and should be the primary, if not sole focus of the game. This is delusion.

You have failed to understand that this game will go the way of the Dodo unless the studio and player base finds some common ground on how to develop content for more than 1 group of players. Developing more players to feel able to take part in higher skill content and thus more content (similar to how many other MMORPGs do with their item grind and item creep) is a fundamental aspect in achieving that goal.

 

Dragon's End alone has probably lead to a larger general understanding of boons, positioning, sub group and squad setup, than any other content in the game to date. Instead of whining and complaining, players should be celebrating how successful this meta was in expanding the games player bases understanding of fundamentals. Instead of everyone focusing on their own obsession of "loot over everything".

[Cyninja.2954]

3 minutes ago, IAmNotMatthew.1058 said:

I don't remember this amount of complaining about Gerent/Tarir being extremely difficult when it was released even though it took like a week for the first success in Tarir and more than that for Gerent. 

There was, but there was also the flip-side of many engaged players giving their all to get server or world first. I remember the forum threads about progress towards both kills as well as the bravado and cheers to the first who succeeded.

We had a very different forum and in game community back then. The game overall was also far more challenging. Orr alone was a dreaded area. Story missions were actually semi difficult because the exotic and ascended item creep hadn't reached all parts of the game and dungeons were multi hour long nightmares in part.

The game hadn't gone through years of coddling players and giving in to the lowest denominator of skill. Showering players with loot for only showing up.

I don't blame the devs though, they simply went the path of least resistance until they had to change their approach or give up on the game.

Edited December 20, 2022 by Cyninja.2954

[mandala.8507]

3 minutes ago, Cyninja.2954 said:

Dragon's End alone has probably lead to a larger general understanding of boons, positioning, sub group and squad setup, than any other content in the game to date. Instead of whining and complaining, players should be celebrating how successful this meta was in expanding the games player bases understanding of fundamentals. Instead of everyone focusing on their own obsession of "loot over everything".

Can I come live in fantasy land with you? Being able to tell fact from fiction is becoming a burden on my mental health at this point and I'm ready to be consumed by the cope. And you're STILL accusing me of just caring about easy and consistent loot. I can't even. This is a worse take than when streamers were claiming fractal CM mystic coins made up 25% of the game's MC economy. A deduction based on nothing but bias and thin air.

You want your statement to be true to confirm your preconceptions, so to you, it is.

[SoftFootpaws.9134]

Most players complaints about stuff like the DE meta are actually complaints about powercreep and how much the devs have had to change the game to keep up with it. To be fair, Heart of Thorns had its own powercreep, but it was nothing like it is now, where even Arah can be full-cleared (no skips) in 15min.

 

But players don't realise this is all because of powercreep, they think the game has just become impossibly hard for them because they couldn't keep up with this arms race the devs have created.

 

I've suggested many times before that damage in all of PvE should be brought down by 30% like it was in PvP/WvW, but such suggestions are never met with anything but hostility because players don't want to give up that power. They want encounters to be casually approachable, but still want to be a walking DPS generator.

 

Did you know that nearly every boss in the game can now be phased before they finish talking?

 

So I'll put it simply, Dragon's End is the way it is because its how players wanted it to be. I just wish they'd un-nerf Orr and Heart of Thorns and toughen up Path of Fire to similar levels. We lost so much good content in order to keep up with the demands for a game that is 100% casually approachable, and now that players can press one button and do 20k+ DPS, the content that was ruined isn't being restored for some reason. We're running on a never-ending treadmill where everything from the past is easier and easier and everything from the future has to be that much more difficult to compensate, like its an episode of Dragonball Z.

 

Players have become so strong that they now literally have power levels.

 

If anything, more and more content will need to be like Dragon's End to keep the game challenging since doing damage has now become as easy as rolling your face on the keyboard.

 

I'd really like to see the "failure" rates for Dragon's Stand, Dragonfall and Dragonstorm.

Edited December 20, 2022 by Mariyuuna.6508

[DexterousGecko.6328]

2 hours ago, Cyninja.2954 said:

Dragon's End alone has probably lead to a larger general understanding of boons, positioning, sub group and squad setup, than any other content in the game to date.

Do you have any data to support that?

[vares.8457]

2 hours ago, Cyninja.2954 said:

Dragon's End alone has probably lead to a larger general understanding of boons, positioning, sub group and squad setup, than any other content in the game to date. Instead of whining and complaining, players should be celebrating how successful this meta was in expanding the games player bases understanding of fundamentals. Instead of everyone focusing on their own obsession of "loot over everything".

Exactly, we need more events like the DE meta. It created a great community experience as well. 

[Cyninja.2954]

42 minutes ago, DexterousGecko.6328 said:

Do you have any data to support that?

Besides subjective experience and the forum threads which appeared a while back complaining that boons have made content to easy as well as a more general demand for specific builds in instanced content especially in more beginner groups, no. That and the wide adoption of quickness, alacrity and subgroup demands especially when doing the DE meta, something unheard of in open world content until now.

 

The developers would though.

Edited December 20, 2022 by Cyninja.2954

[Genthore.2384]

It like the rest of the expansion was not up to my expectations- I played through it once and I wont be back in that area again except for fishing titles

[idpersona.3810]

1 hour ago, vares.8457 said:

Exactly, we need more events like the DE meta. It created a great community experience as well. 

Because text-inflection can be hard to read, I genuinely don't know if this is sarcasm or not. I hope it is.

 

3 hours ago, Cyninja.2954 said:

Dragon's End alone has probably lead to a larger general understanding of boons, positioning, sub group and squad setup, than any other content in the game to date. Instead of whining and complaining, players should be celebrating how successful this meta was in expanding the games player bases understanding of fundamentals. Instead of everyone focusing on their own obsession of "loot over everything".

This might be the case for the smaller subset of players that decided to keep coming back to this meta. Personally, (and this is anecdotal evidence) all of my friends quickly got tired or trying this meta and ended up basically never coming back to this zone. The time investment just isn't worth it. I have to imagine that same reaction happened to a lot of players. So no, they didn't learn anything about boons or subgroups, etc.. They just quit going to a zone/meta that was a waste of time and pointlessly frustrating and would fail for no identifiable reason.

This meta isn't challenging in the personal sense. It doesn't really teach you anything, because no matter how well you play your class you can (and will) still fail if the group isn't put together way in advance of the fight. Having to show up up to an hour before a meta event actually starts is kind of ridiculous (imo).
Having gotten the turtle on 2 accounts, I rarely come back to this zone now aside from occasional farming (events and jade). If the meta starts up while I'm on the map, it fails more often than it succeeds. If I have the time and join a group early (30-45 min+), the meta is virtually guaranteed to succeed. To me this says it would have been better off as a Dragonstorm style instance instead of being an open world meta. But I think that ship has sailed and we have what we have. 

[Cuks.8241]

1 hour ago, DexterousGecko.6328 said:

Do you have any data to support that?

Noone can support such claim, even anet probably cant reliably. 

But I also believe the gap between instanced pve crowd and purely ow crowd has narrowed and DE meta is a part of it. 

Why I feel that is so? Just my general observation of arc in ow, lots of activity in strikes and raids, and chat. 

[vares.8457]

15 minutes ago, idpersona.3810 said:

Because text-inflection can be hard to read, I genuinely don't know if this is sarcasm or not. I hope it is.

It’s not. It’s a great meta event, the community came together, communicated and organized themselves. It created communities that run the meta regularly. 
Of course there are players that didn’t came back to the map after they failed, but a lot of players came back after they failed at the beginning and now they found communities to run the meta together, they never fail.