Janthir Wilds is a huge disappointment for me, there are things that I would like the developers to change in the game

[Darves.6798]

17 minutes ago, Linken.6345 said:

Yea was about to say that I would not go both sword sword and greatsword.

It is always good to be able to disengage so staff for some range is nice, but if not then just swap said staff for greatsword.

None of the traits is staff exlusive so wont change the build in any way.

Thank you. Will this build, if I change staff to greatsword, be extremely easy for a noob like me to complete the entire plot, LW's and all the expansions without pain and much frustration?

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

2 minutes ago, Darves.6798 said:

Thank you. Will this build, if I change staff to greatsword, be extremely easy for a noob like me to complete the entire plot, LW's and all the expansions without pain and much frustration?

Probably not if you don't pay attention to the mechanics of each fight.  Or use the Wiki for the walk-through.

Edited August 11 by Inculpatus cedo.9234

[Linken.6345]

5 minutes ago, Darves.6798 said:

Thank you. Will this build, if I change staff to greatsword, be extremely easy for a noob like me to complete the entire plot, LW's and all the expansions without pain and much frustration?

No idea since I dont know you but it looks promising since there is no rotation you can just press most stuff off cd.

The only think he specify in the video is to use shroud 5 before shroud 4 so you spew out chilling bolts.

Edit

Note however this wont let you stand still and just spam skills while everything hit back.

Check the video out and look how the youtuber is moving and understand why they do what they do.

Edit 2

So only took 17 and a half pages to start asking questions and looking for help better late then never eh?

Edited August 11 by Linken.6345

[Maienstern.2154]

3 minutes ago, Darves.6798 said:

Thank you. Will this build, if I change staff to greatsword, be extremely easy for a noob like me to complete the entire plot, LW's and all the expansions without pain and much frustration?

Hard to say. Everyone is diffrent. I, for some reason, find condi dps mech super easy, but that's not a build you would typically recommend to a noob/super casual player since the granate kit is all ground targets. I'd say, give it a try and if it doesn't work you now know where to find people willing to help. And don't be shy to just test out diffrent stuff yourself. The game isn't so difficult that it will punish you for not exactly following build guides. For my main I tryed putting togehter a build myself and later I found out, that by pure chance I had create something that was about 90% identical with a guide from snowcrows. For my alts I am currently experimenting with copiing a build guide and than fine tuning it to my liking through trial and error. If you struggle switch around a trait or two and maybe swap out a weapon and test if it gets better or worse.

[Atoclone.4810]

12 minutes ago, Darves.6798 said:

Thank you. Will this build, if I change staff to greatsword, be extremely easy for a noob like me to complete the entire plot, LW's and all the expansions without pain and much frustration?

Tbh, you'd probably be better off with a ranged minion build, I don't know necro but I'm sure some one who does could cobble you together a cele build. You're not looking for maximum performance, you're after survivability and ease 

[Darves.6798]

14 minutes ago, Maienstern.2154 said:

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Special_Forces_Training_Area This was an absolut game changer for me. You can go there and practice and try stuff. The only downside is that there is not option to make the golem fight back.

I didn't know about this place because the game never directed me there

 

15 minutes ago, Maienstern.2154 said:

But if you have EoD you can got to https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Monastery_Training

I have EoD, but as I said, the most important thing for me is the plot, so I don't want to spoiler it.

[Maienstern.2154]

Just now, Darves.6798 said:

I have EoD, but as I said, the most important thing for me is the plot, so I don't want to spoiler it.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Teleport_to_Friend if you have one of those you can ask someone to let you teleport there, so you don't have to start the story to unlock the area.

[Atoclone.4810]

1 minute ago, Darves.6798 said:

I didn't know about this place because the game never directed me there

 

I have EoD, but as I said, the most important thing for me is the plot, so I don't want to spoiler it.

You can also go to the PvP lobby. Sure the skills can be slightly different in numbers but you can see how you enjoy the style of the build with it needing to get it to 80 or buy proper gear

[Darves.6798]

16 minutes ago, Linken.6345 said:

Note however this wont let you stand still and just spam skills while everything hit back.

Yes, I am aware of that

 

16 minutes ago, Linken.6345 said:

So only took 17 and a half pages to start asking questions and looking for help better late then never eh?

Yes, better late than never, but that doesn't change my mind about asking developers to introduce an easy mode 😉

[Krzysztof.5973]

I would pay good money to see OP play a piece of story content for 10min that he deems hard. No commentary needed. Up for the challenge OP?

[Maienstern.2154]

3 minutes ago, Darves.6798 said:

I didn't know about this place because the game never directed me there

Yeah, that's one of the things the game could do better to teach people how it is played. I learned about it from a youtube guide by Mukluk.

[Darves.6798]

3 minutes ago, Krzysztof.5973 said:

I would pay good money to see OP play a piece of story content for 10min that he deems hard. No commentary needed. Up for the challenge OP?

Oh interesting. How much money? Maybe I can craft some legendary armor or buy a Permanent Hair Stylist Contract or some awesome legendary weapon 😉

[Maienstern.2154]

I'm going offline now. I don't know how much help I can offer, seeing as I am recoveing from a serious challenge allergy myself, but you are welcome to add me as a friend in game and if you need help, I'll see what I can do. A teleport to friend to give you access to the training heart, is definitly something I could do. (I am assuming you play on the EU servers aswell, since you mentioned you're from Europe.) Best of luck for now, and I truely hope cele reaper will be your "easy mode".

[Darves.6798]

3 minutes ago, Maienstern.2154 said:

I'm going offline now. I don't know how much help I can offer, seeing as I am recoveing from a serious challenge allergy myself, but you are welcome to add me as a friend in game and if you need help, I'll see what I can do. A teleport to friend to give you access to the training heart, is definitly something I could do. (I am assuming you play on the EU servers aswell, since you mentioned you're from Europe.) Best of luck for now, and I truely hope cele reaper will be your "easy mode".

Thank you very much for your help 🙂

[Krzysztof.5973]

5 hours ago, Darves.6798 said:

I'll repeat it. The fight against Zhaitan was very difficult, I kept dying.

(with timestamp) 
Was this part difficult? 

[Darves.6798]

40 minutes ago, Krzysztof.5973 said:

Was this part difficult? 

But why do you withdraw from the proposal to share the gold? 😛 

never mind, just kidding

If you read carefully what I wrote earlier, I mentioned that the core game was difficult, but acceptable. I complained mainly about the difficulty level of LW1 and LW2 and that Hot is supposedly even more difficult. But you stuck to fighting Zaithan. The dragon had a lot of health, it hit hard, mobs appeared around you and they also attacked you, and you were on a narrow deck and there was no way to escape. The fight lasted a long time, I fell often, but somehow I got through it.

[refrain.8941]

11 hours ago, Inculpatus cedo.9234 said:

An alt account?

lol no

[Sircian.8065]

So, just out of interest, I tried the OP's deadeye "build", the one they said was bad. Admittedly there wasn't a full build to go by, so went with what they had said, and made up the rest. What I had from the OP's posts was:
1. use pistol/pistol and dagger/dagger, with full PPF(Berserker's) gear. I did that.
2.  deadeye was unlocked, but not completed. My thief has deadeye fully unlocked, so I just didn't choose any major traits or deadeye skills to try and get something close to the OP's experience.

Traits, I chose myself. Not looking at any guides. I'm not a regular thief player, so I wasn't going into it with any knowledge of which trait lines are good. Final trait lineup was Critical Strikes - Twin Fangs, Dradly Aim, Invigorating Precision, Deadly Arts - Dagger Training, Revealed Training, Executioner.

Utilities were also just up to me. I took Signet of Malice for some no-effort sustain, assassin's signet for no effort damage, Shadowstep for a quick escape teleport, and haste as a stunbreak and occasional quickness source. I also took basilisk venom for defiance bars,

Then I took it through the Tower of Nightmares story, since that's one of the places the OP said they had trouble, just to see for myself if it was a bad build holding them back. My tactics in combat were pretty simple: Using pistols, mark an enemy, then press 3 until dead, then repeat. If the enemy tried to get close, I'd just hold a strafe key and keep the camera angled at them so I could keep spamming pistol 3. In the actual instanced parts of the story, I only came close to going down a couple of times. Once to a watchknight with a reflective shield making me crit myself 8 times in the face, and once to failing to notice that the Baron of Rot was part of the first group that spawns in the end sequence of the final instance. (He's optional, by the way, and vulnerable to the strafe and shoot strategy, just dodge roll when he leaps at you). Outside of the instanced parts, it was a slightly different story. When doing the open world events for one story step, I got horribly murdered by the krait blood witch, and once again I crit myself repeatedly in the face from the toxic alchemist's shield. Fortunately there were other players around in both instances, so the bosses quickly fell even without my help.

The tower of nightmares itself was the only real pain point. I went in when the public event wasn't active, so it was just me and a couple of other confused stragglers trying to get some progress on the first floor events before we inevitably got swarmed by elites. We did make it to the second floor though, even if it took me a few minutes of running Rytlock around in circles (same strafe and shoot strategy as before) before anyone else showed up in the nightmare pod. I got completely stuck on the second floor, though, ended up switching map to reset and somehow timed it perfectly to hit the public event, so there was a group of 10-15 people alongside me that time, and it was far easier. This did seem like it could be better signposted. Give the npc who lets you into the tower a line about "preparing for a major assault set to take place in X minutes", or something, to let people know when the next public event is without having to know about the wiki's event timers.

Ironically, the tower does have an easy mode of sorts. Just give a bunch of spores to the woman at the entrance (who actively tries to get you to talk to her, so she's hardly easily missable) and you can skip it entirely. This npc could also do with a spot of improvement though. She can only take spores from your inventory, not your bank, and she won't even acknowledge that you have spores in there, which means a newbie who knows how to use the deposit function may miss out on the option.

I still disagree with the need for an easy mode, given how little effort it took to get through any solo part of the story, even with a suboptimal build, but it's clear that some improvements could be made to signposting and npc interations, just to make it clearer to players who may not know about the wiki, or other good third party sources of information.

I'm also going to throw in another reason why I'm against an easy mode. OP, you linked the Josh Strife Hayes video on why people play MMOs solo, but he's done another very good one on predatory game design/pay to win, with a section on buying power in a cash shop. One of the points he makes is that when you start selling something in the cash shop, there's an incentive to make the optional thing you're selling more and more necessary, so in the case of an easy mode, you'd have the regular mode being made harder and harder to "encourage" people to buy the easy mode, and maybe even the easy mode being made harder if it becomes the new point the devs are balancing around. In the end you would be left with a tax on new players, which doesn't seem like a good way to run a game long term, or a solution to your problem. Maybe the devs wouldn't do this, but there have been a few times where they have chosen profit over player satisfaction, so I'm not sure I would completely trust them.

 

[Darves.6798]

32 minutes ago, Sircian.8065 said:

I'm also going to throw in another reason why I'm against an easy mode. OP, you linked the Josh Strife Hayes video on why people play MMOs solo, but he's done another very good one on predatory game design/pay to win, with a section on buying power in a cash shop. One of the points he makes is that when you start selling something in the cash shop, there's an incentive to make the optional thing you're selling more and more necessary, so in the case of an easy mode, you'd have the regular mode being made harder and harder to "encourage" people to buy the easy mode, and maybe even the easy mode being made harder if it becomes the new point the devs are balancing around. In the end you would be left with a tax on new players, which doesn't seem like a good way to run a game long term, or a solution to your problem. Maybe the devs wouldn't do this, but there have been a few times where they have chosen profit over player satisfaction, so I'm not sure I would completely trust them.

Fair enough. This is a solid argument with which I can agree. Yes, this is a sensible argument, not: this is good, I don't want changes, learn to play. Yes, I also saw the movie you are talking about. I have faith in the developers that they would not want to hurt the players and that they would introduce an easy mode for all the story content, LW's and expansions to help the player, not hurt them, but as you say, there is always a certain danger.

However, in your experiment you prove in part that the game is difficult in places, that there are painful moments, that you often die, that the plot content is poorly marked, that what to do is sometimes confusing. Now imagine that a complete noob like me starts playing this game.

 

Edited August 12 by Darves.6798

[Linken.6345]

6 minutes ago, Darves.6798 said:

Fair enough. This is a solid argument with which I can agree. Yes, this is a sensible argument, not: this is good, I don't want changes, learn to play. Yes, I also saw the movie you are talking about. I have faith in the developers that they would not want to hurt the players and that they would introduce an easy mode for all the story content, LW's and expansions to help the player, not hurt them, but as you say, there is always a certain danger.

However, in your experiment you prove in part that the game is difficult in places, that there are painful moments, that you often die, that the plot content is poorly marked, that what to do is sometimes confusing. Now imagine that a complete noob like me starts playing this game.

 

Then in game /wiki name of thing

for example /wiki tower of nightmares

And read up on what you find hard to grasp.