[feedback] "Old Friends" achievements

[tanpopo.9102]

I've been replaying some old story journal content to help finish my Quietus collection. I'm not exactly a fan of forcing us to replay story or strike content to finish these, but that's another problem.

This story segment was actually pretty enjoyable and entertaining, from strictly a non-achievement perspective: Entertaining dialogue (subject to personal taste), a bit of back story, and overall a nice opening into this expansion. I also want to say that it seems like the artists who work on this game consistently do a pretty fantastic job.

However, the achievements for this section are leaving a very sour taste in my mouth, and are reminding me why I probably left all these uncompleted in the first place. I'm getting the impression that someone just tacked these on afterwards, did some basic "ok it works" testing, and just left it at that, without any real regard for player experience or respect for others' time.

Think Before You Leap: Clear the Armada using the leap skill less than 10 times. This one is actually pretty nice in theory, because it requires some level of planning ahead and strategy, which is actually a nice way to make replaying content more fun. Except this ability is quite buggy, and often results in me falling off target... which is fine, except the counter for this achievement still drops no matter what. The wiki recommends "consider using leap abilities from skills and bundles to save on Prismatic Leap uses, such as the Lightning Hammer or Experimental Rifle." Should these sorts of measures really be necessary? Also, it's rather difficult sometimes to ground target on a platform that is moving or higher than you. This makes the next achievement even more annoying:

This Isn't Cannon: Avoid all cannon fire and spinning traps. This doesn't sound too bad at first, but there's a lot of cheap shots and trial-and-error memorization. It's the kind of gameplay that I wish died in the 90s (I was there and I don't miss it), and it reminds me a bit of SAB's Tribulation mode, where the whole "challenge" is just cheap shot surprises that you need to memorize. It doesn't help at all that cannon projectiles fire without warning and have very poor visual indication (black cannon balls against dark ships), and the cannoneers' AOE indicator lasts for maybe half a second before it actually hits. It's enough that I can barely dodge in time, but not if I happen to get stuck in some animation lock. If you watch this GuildJen video, about 25s in, she gets cheap shot by a cannon before she even really has a chance to do anything. But hey, I guess it's easy once you've memorized the entire level already? The spinning traps could also be a rather cheap shot the first time for melee players, given that they are difficult to spot in the chaos that is GW2's graphics effects. Also, given that my favorite character is a weaver, good luck taking out some of the ranged cannoneers if you happen to get stuck in combat with only a melee weapon equipped.

Mission checkpoints are actually a good thing, except in this case one of the checkpoints is in the middle, and directly interferes with the above achievement, so if you get hit, you are stuck with this failure condition, and you need to restart the entire story chapter.

The nature of these achievements means that it's generally easiest to do all of them separately, which honestly feels like a poor way of padding gameplay. There's already a ton of stuff to do in this game, and it's already tedious enough that someone might choose to replay story on multiple characters to finish their elite collections.

It would be nice if future "achievements" would be more forgiving, or at least give us a way to quickly restart the achievement part while still in the instance. An allowance of 2-3 hits would've made this so much easier. I was also going to suggest that the meta-achievement allow for partial completion instead of every single achievement, but I'm just now noticing that even though it says "Complete all 16 EOD Act 1 Achievements," there are actually 18, so I may have been wasting my time, after being misled by poor wording. It seems this is also the case for Acts 1-4... guess I'll file a bug report after confirming I don't need all 16.

QUALITY OVER QUANTITY

[Urud.4925]

The second achievement in particular is quite difficult, I had to try it several times, with different classes (in the end I made it with a condi soulbeast). The good thing is that it's at least solo-able, so you can try until you get it. I prefer these achievements to the ones that require a group (like some fractal ones or the bugged salt on the wound). I hope you made it in the meantime.