The Cheese of Jormag, one large hole with all the taste gone with the arctic wind.

[Obtena.7952]

23 minutes ago, Randulf.7614 said:

I don’t think we are discussing the same thing at this point to be honest. This thread exists because the encounter is currently broken. Not because it’s fundamental design is too easy. It just needs restoring to how it was designed. Nothing more.

Im not sure how anticipating it breaking again is relevant really, but yes if the design mechanics break down again, it should be fixed again. It took many years to get this point though.

I genuinely don’t understand the objections though. It existed for years without complaint and ensuring it’s preserved shouldn’t be controversial.

Hold on ... The question here is who is the encounter meant for and how it is intended for players to interact with it, not who it's broken for. The reason it existed for years without complaint is because it's not actually broken. What's happening at this time is that it's simply being zerged by players well above its level of challenge. 

I could argue that ANY content in the game is broken if I flood it with enough overly  geared veterans to trivialize it ... so that's can't be a reason to 'fix' it. 

 

Edited January 11, 2023 by Obtena.7952

[Astralporing.1957]

On 1/10/2023 at 3:41 PM, Azureus.5428 said:

So you're against people who oppose Anet restructuring the original project of the game, after all the testing and careful calibration, in a way that suggests they simply had no staff and money to do any better... and then leaving the results to rot, focusing on the new content and making a whole core of the game something where fails don't happen. Even though they seem to have resources to restore the original vision now.

K. Have it your way.

No. I disagree with both your belief in what that "original vision" was, and with your desire of what it should be.

[Khisanth.2948]

On 1/9/2023 at 1:04 PM, Astralporing.1957 said:

Also, i think that you might either be misremembering the "challenge" of the original game, or you have just never noticed that it's not the game that has changed, but your skill that went up since then. Because i sure remember a game that was a casuals' paradise even at a relatively low level of skill, and was initially hard only because people were underleveled, undergeared, and didn't realize yet how important dodging is.

Heh I remember grinding away at Claw of Jormag for hours because there was no time limit yet and the rewards sucked so there were only a tiny handful of people there.

I also remember when the rewards were improved and people got incentivized to speedrun the world bosses. Getting "proper" runs of Claw was easy at that time as well but it was no more challenging than it is now. When it comes to open world and even some instanced content in this game there are basically only two situation where things are challenging, 1) you decided to go solo some group content 2) you have "allies" that show up who neither know their own characters nor the content and they have no interest in improving. Triple Trouble and to a much lesser degree Teq which still requires a bit of organizing(getting people on turrets) might be exceptions.

49 minutes ago, Randulf.7614 said:

I don’t think we are discussing the same thing at this point to be honest. This thread exists because the encounter is currently broken. Not because it’s fundamental design is too easy. It just needs restoring to how it was designed. Nothing more.

Im not sure how anticipating it breaking again is relevant really, but yes if the design mechanics break down again, it should be fixed again. It took many years to get this point though.

I genuinely don’t understand the objections though. It existed for years without complaint and ensuring it’s preserved shouldn’t be controversial.

People used to stand on the rock on the right and shoot at Claw instead of escorting golems. What aspect is broken now? Every time ANet has made changes in the past it was to nerf the rock and not Claw.

[Randulf.7614]

Just now, Khisanth.2948 said:

Heh I remember grinding away at Claw of Jormag for hours because there was no time limit yet and the rewards sucked so there were only a tiny handful of people there.

I also remember when the rewards were improved and people got incentivized to speedrun the world bosses. Getting "proper" runs of Claw was easy at that time as well but it was no more challenging than it is now. When it comes to open world and even some instanced content in this game there are basically only two situation where things are challenging, 1) you decided to go solo some group content 2) you have "allies" that show up who neither know their own characters nor the content and they have no interest in improving. Triple Trouble and to a much lesser degree Teq which still requires a bit of organizing(getting people on turrets) might be exceptions.

People used to stand on the rock on the right and shoot at Claw instead of escorting golems. What aspect is broken now? Every time ANet has made changes in the past it was to nerf the rock and not Claw.

On phase two, you no longer wait for the damage phase to start. Everyone goes to the landing point, heals through the ice fields and dps as the boss lands. It’s killed almost immediately. Phase one also has skippable tricks. No golems, no mechanics.

[Khisanth.2948]

7 minutes ago, Randulf.7614 said:

On phase two, you no longer wait for the damage phase to start.

This has always been true. So nothing was actually broken. It is just a continuation of the same problem that has always existed. Each time they nerfed the rock I also wondered why they didn't just make the Claw unattackable. The conclusion I came up with was that they still wanted people to be able to do that encounter without engaging in the golem escort mechanic for whatever reason either that or allowing it to be damaged was required for the golems to work.

[Astralporing.1957]

3 minutes ago, Randulf.7614 said:

On phase two, you no longer wait for the damage phase to start.

It has always been that way. The difference is that nowadays the overall zerg dps is higher and you can do it in that initial burn, but even before HoT i remember seeing Claw end up with less than 10% hp left after initial burn, and people whittling down the rest from right side rock down to zero before Claw even got stunned by golems. Didn't happen very often (usually the most you could count on in the initial burn was dealing around 20%, and you needed at least one, mabybe two more stuns to finish the rest), but it wasn;t exactly rare either. And most of the time noone was escorting golems anyway, because even if noone bothered stun phase eventually did happen on its own. It just took longer.

And while the first phase initial skip is relatively new, the active hit point in first phase that was there even when Claw was flying up (after burn has ended) was discovered very fast, and after that it became really easy to end that phase in one wall destruction. Not to mention that phase wasn't exactly hard even without it, people just stood on the right side and spammed rockets from max distance till wall got down. And as mentioned before, there was no timer initially. I have soloed that phase few times with absolutely no issues.

So, yeah, it's a bit faster now. Is it any harder? Nope, it's not. Was doing mechanics necessary at any point? Not really, it wasn't.

[robertthebard.8150]

2 hours ago, Randulf.7614 said:

I don’t think we are discussing the same thing at this point to be honest. This thread exists because the encounter is currently broken. Not because it’s fundamental design is too easy. It just needs restoring to how it was designed. Nothing more.

Im not sure how anticipating it breaking again is relevant really, but yes if the design mechanics break down again, it should be fixed again. It took many years to get this point though.

I genuinely don’t understand the objections though. It existed for years without complaint and ensuring it’s preserved shouldn’t be controversial.

As we can see from the replies after this exchange, it's not far off what it has always been, as far as encounter design.  What changed was skill/gear of the players.  So, if it needs to be revamped to accommodate that now, it's going to need it again when those skill/gear levels increase again, and every time they increase.  It may also need to be modified every time someone comes up with a new meta for builds that further trivializes the content, barring the fact that the reason these meta builds exist in the first place is to trivialize the content.

[Randulf.7614]

33 minutes ago, robertthebard.8150 said:

As we can see from the replies after this exchange, it's not far off what it has always been, as far as encounter design.  What changed was skill/gear of the players.  So, if it needs to be revamped to accommodate that now, it's going to need it again when those skill/gear levels increase again, and every time they increase.  It may also need to be modified every time someone comes up with a new meta for builds that further trivializes the content, barring the fact that the reason these meta builds exist in the first place is to trivialize the content.

If the walls barred dps as they were designed and If the Claw wasn’t vulnerable until the golems did their thing, there would never need to be continuous adjustments. Sure, sometimes there were workarounds before (which Anet tried to patch over to mixed results to avoid the content being trivialised), but it’s gone too far. A significant core level 80 zone boss should not be quicker than a starter zone boss.

At the end of the day, my feedback is that this fight needs adjustment to be more how it was. It currently isn’t anything like it once was and I enjoyed how it used to be. I enjoyed the mechanics. I enjoyed the fight. I enjoyed the banter. None of that exists anymore in my opinion. 
 

Not everyone clearly feels the same, but I don’t believe it to be detrimental to the game either to restore it.

Anyway, good discussion. I don’t agree with many, but nice to see the forum can still produce reasonable back and forth without throats being ripped out.

Edited January 11, 2023 by Randulf.7614

[Silent.6137]

32 minutes ago, Randulf.7614 said:

A significant core level 80 zone boss should not be quicker than a starter zone boss.

I don't think anyone's disagreeing with you on the need for adjustments. It is the word 'broken' that is the issue. It is not broken but rather that players find ways to trivialize yet another event by employing a new strategy. It starts with the Siege Turtles in the 1st phase which makes the walls ineffective. Maybe a solution would be to disable mounts within a certain range of Jormag. And make other tweaks and/or impose conditions such that the intended mechanics has to be carried out before it can ve killed.