Dark Library and Anet's Confusion about "Content"

[etsubmariner.4690]

The mission, Dark Library, is part of the griffon mount chain of events. After spending 250 gold + a ton of other time collecting cool stuff, seeing the Sunspear Sanctuary come alive, we arrive in what's left of the Library. The mission? Kill 10 elites, which are really just the same four elites copied over with a terribly small area they can be wander in combined with near instant heal if they disengage. Uh, yeah, no. I did it readily enough by choosing the elites my thief could handle and utilizing terrain to kill 'em off, but I have to ask why Anet thinks this is OK. It isn't really Ok.

1. 250 gold spent.
2. Our time spent up to this point doing cool things related to collecting and honoring the Sunspears and the griffon species.
3. 10 elites (really, again, just 4 copies - wtf) that disengage way too quickly and often, instantly healing.

I appreciate their paths are pretty limited in there, but it's in need to some retooling. I feel it is disrespectful to the player (who just spent 250 gold that itself required time and probably actual money). I appreciate that an enemy NPC that disengages combat anywhere else heals and goes back to it's starting position as if nothing happens, but combined in this one instance = bad design.

Another bad design I feel needs retooling, as an example, is the Elder Djinn for the Glorifying the Golden Heart. Requires a player on the map who has all the masteries, 4 champs after all the other NPCs are dead, etc etc. I feel the problem is that Anet thinks that throwing a bunch of stuff into one scenario equates to "content" and that something less jumbled together would somehow be "less" acceptable. The raid on the Minister's house in Season 3 was yet another overlong, multiple raid-like atmosphere that precedes these examples. Bad design.

I don't need a massive set of events all in one instance. I don't want to spend 250 gold to find The Library in this state. I don't feel cheated. I feel like my time was disrespected. I liked the premise of recovering writings from the Library, but the way it plays out with elites healing if they walk 10 feet too far just isn't something I can agree with as "good".

[slayerking.3581]

I was getting really pissed off with the one at the top that summoned the healing sparks like crazy, Then I realised that the ones down the bottom had re spawned ;) Pick the easy ones and wait for them to re spawn.

[Coulter.2315]

Those elites aren't disengaging, you are. Fight them where they are..Also you can be the person on the map who has all the mastery and hero points for the djinn.Complaining that you're being "disrespected" is ridiculous.

[slayerking.3581]

@Coulter.2315 said:Those elites aren't disengaging, you are. Fight them where they are..Complaining that you're being "disrespected" is ridiculous.

Exactly, I don't know what he/she's on about. None of them ran away from me once I started fighting them and none of them healed back up except the top one.

[Ohoni.6057]

@Coulter.2315 said:Those elites aren't disengaging, you are. Fight them where they are..

That's not entirely true. The pathing is SUPER buggy in the library, and if you haven't experienced it then you were just lucky. In some cases you can move even just slightly and they reset, for example on the outer ring, there is a low, then slightly raised, then low again area, only a foot between them, but if you are on different heights the enemy sometimes disengages. Unless you stand perfectly still (which is suicide against many of them), you will likely reset at least a few of them.

I'm not as salty about all this as the OP, and I really don't get the whinging about the 250 gold, but the Library really was a super-buggy instance that just felt rushed out the door with minimal testing, and I'm almost certain that this is how it happened. They have done better, and should do better than that.

[Illconceived Was Na.9781]

This instance really isn't any different from the rest of the requirements:

• If killing 4 foes is fun, then ANet thinks that killing 10 is twice as fun.
• If opening 4 items in one map is fun, then ANet designs as if finding/opening 5 in 5 maps is more fun.

Basically everything en route to the Griffon is a form of duplication, it's just slightly more obvious in the Library because it's so dense with foes.

The fact is that there are just so many varieties of tasks: go & find a thing, find a thing and bring it back, kill a big thing, kill a lot of small things, find a thing to transform and deliver it elsewhere, talk to a guy about a thing, help a gal with a thing, and do any of that with one hand tied behind your back (or while using a particular tool|mount|weapon etc). Sometimes the developers are on a roll and they are able to disguise the sameness in interesting ways, with a story. Sometimes, they miss the mark.

I can see why the OP thinks that ANet fell short with the Library, but at the same time, it's not because there's any true fundamental difference with the rest of the Griffon tasks. The Library is just as content-rich as the rest (or content-lacking); it just wasn't dressed up as prettily.

Perhaps ANet should have done better, after setting our expectations with the rest of the quest. On the other, the problem could easily have been resolved by reducing it to only four books with four unique foes and no respawns. That wouldn't be any more or any less content, but it would address all the issues raised by the OP about the Library.

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@Ohoni.6057 said:

@Coulter.2315 said:Those elites aren't disengaging, you are. Fight them where they are..

That's not entirely true. The pathing is SUPER buggy in the library, and if you haven't experienced it then you were just lucky.

Or if you have experienced buggy pathing, then you might have been unlucky or doing something odd. I did all sorts of odd things, because I wanted to see if I could re-orient myself before hand. I didn't have any trouble from disengaging foes or keeping them engaged. I'm not suggesting my experience was necessarily typical; I'm saying that you (and the OP) similarly don't know if your experience was typical.

[Ohoni.6057]

@"Illconceived Was Na.9781" said:Or if you have experienced buggy pathing, then you might have been unlucky or doing something odd.

Doubtful, I experienced several different varieties of pathing bugs over the course of completing the mission, including:

• Tons of smaller enemies that just would never agro, even when right on top of them. Any normal enemy definitely would have been all over me, but they wouldn't even notice.
• Bosses on those outer gold rings that would disengage when moving from one level of it to the other, even if I remained in melee range the entire time.
• One shade (the one with the hammers) for whom I was "out of range/unable to attack" for about thirty seconds of trying, as I was moving throguh and around his character model as he followed his patrol path, until eventually he became targettable.
• The "small circle/wide doughnut" Imp required constantly moving to stay inside his attack radius and yet if you backed up slightly too far then he would disengage.
• The "red light/green light" boss would frequently "punish" me even while the green light was up, or allow me to wail on him for several seconds during a red light, and his own health started to reset several times during the fight.

And keep in mind, this was NOT normal for my GW2 experience, so I doubt it was some sort of weird lag issue or something more general.

I will not believe that this stage was not merely slapped together late in the process using recycled assets, and then given minimal testing before it was kicked out the door. I understand why they would do this, but I honestly would have preferred no version of this to the un-refined version we got.

[Manasa Devi.7958]

One of the aatxe bosses went invulnerable and healed back from almost dead when I dodged through it. I never went out of melee range. The phase shifted one disengaged when I did what that ability told me to do and went outside the blue ring to range it when the arrows pointed me there. There's definitely some fishy stuff going on in that instance.

[etsubmariner.4690]

@Coulter.2315 said:Those elites aren't disengaging, you are. Fight them where they are..Also you can be the person on the map who has all the mastery and hero points for the djinn.Complaining that you're being "disrespected" is ridiculous.

I hate to mention this boils and ghouls, but not every profession can just stand in at the NPC's feet and go toe to toe. You have been in the Library for this right? Tight arse pathways, etc etc. A thief or a mesmer is just supposed to hang out there under an elite until it's dead? Yeah.

[zealex.9410]

Meanwhile i love the library. Seing abaddon's minions (or grenths) comming back in aftwr kormir is gone. Meeting story characters again after the story and reclaiming the writings of the sunspears before they are lost was really fun. That and seing the sun spears iv helped from all the maps really were the highlights for me.

[Rauderi.8706]

@slayerking.3581 said:None of them ran away from me once I started fighting them and none of them healed back up except the top one.

I only had the disengage issue with the elite shade on the outer ring. There's a large step in the middle of the floor, and if it knocked me back so I was "out of bounds", it would shrug, float away, and heal instantly while I was trying to get its attention. Changed my strat a bit so that I didn't have my back to the elevation change when he might puff up, and that pretty much fixed it.But kitten that one particular fleshweaver, yo. :\

[CptAurellian.9537]

@etsubmariner.4690 said:

@Coulter.2315 said:Those elites aren't disengaging, you are. Fight them where they are..Also

you

can be the person on the map who has all the mastery and hero points for the djinn.Complaining that you're being "disrespected" is ridiculous.

I hate to mention this boils and ghouls, but not every profession can just stand in at the NPC's feet and go toe to toe. You have been in the Library for this right? Tight kitten pathways, etc etc. A thief or a mesmer is just supposed to hang out there under an elite until it's dead? Yeah.

Oh, a mesmer can probably hang out under the boss for a long, long time. Most of those blocks, evades and invulns don't even require you to move. A thief, on the other hand, will at least have to move a bit due to the nature of their evades. May trigger one of those nasty resets, but in principle you can evade-tank most of the elites for an eternity.

[Astralporing.1957]

@Coulter.2315 said:Those elites aren't disengaging, you are. Fight them where they are..

Some of them have knockdown effects, and can "disengage" in the one second you're down knocked and dazed, healing half their hp bar before you're back up. Yes, that's when meleeing them in the very spot they were when you engaged.

There's definitely something wrong with the disengage conditions/timer on them.

Now, it doesn't make the fight any harder, but it definitely makes it longer and more annoying.

[SkullsandRoses.5803]

@slayerking.3581 said:I was getting really pissed off with the one at the top that summoned the healing sparks like crazy, Then I realised that the ones down the bottom had re spawned ;) Pick the easy ones and wait for them to re spawn.

This is exactly what I did! The Elite Aatxe just kept respawning and it was the easiest for my Dragonhunter to kill so ... I got all 9 keys from doing that. Then avoided the other Elites while I ran around to get the chests. Made this whole thing a whole lot easier!

[Ellisande.5218]

@Coulter.2315 said:Those elites aren't disengaging, you are. Fight them where they are..Also you can be the person on the map who has all the mastery and hero points for the djinn.Complaining that you're being "disrespected" is ridiculous.

No. You are the one being ridiculous. In a game where the combat is focused on having the player spend all of their time rolling, dodging and running around to avoid shit and being hit, the player simply cannot be thought as disengaging simply because they were moving the way the game trained them to move when fighting an elite mob. This is the game punishing you for playing the way it taught you to play and the way it requires you to play. That is disrespect.

Making you farm 250 gold, a gargantuan sum to some players, and then requiring you to kill 10 annoying elites after you just spent that much time farming 250 gold is disrespecting the time you spent farming 250 gold. Either require the player to farm or kill annoying poorly designed mooks, not both. Requiring the player to farm and then placing their reward for farming behind 10 poorly designed mooks that punish the player for playing right is disrespectful to the player.

[tigirius.9014]

Yeah was never interested in that mount it doesn't really make the game more enjoyable for me and the requirements are honestly outrageous.

[tigirius.9014]

@Coulter.2315 said:Those elites aren't disengaging, you are. Fight them where they are..Also you can be the person on the map who has all the mastery and hero points for the djinn.Complaining that you're being "disrespected" is ridiculous.

Actually had you read the bug forums you'd realize that it is a known bug that they are working on. It's not limited to the elites reported here it's happening all over the game. Mobs suddenly stop fighting become immune and then run off somewhere resetting. Plz stay informed.

[Sir Vincent III.1286]

I did everything in this Griffon quest path with my Thief using P/P and Rifle on first try and never had any problem in terms of pathing or disengaging. Even though I'm using P/P, I'm up to their faces. You just need to bring the right healing skill (Hide in Shadows), utility skills (Ambush, Caltrops, Shadow Refuge) and Elite skill (Thieve's Guild).

[Ohoni.6057]

@Ellisande.5218 said:Making you farm 250 gold, a gargantuan sum to some players, and then requiring you to kill 10 annoying elites after you just spent that much time farming 250 gold is disrespecting the time you spent farming 250 gold.

The content was poorly designed, but this is a silly argument. 250 gold is not enough to get that worked up about, at least not for someone who should be having a griffon, and ANet has no particular reason to care about the gold spent. What they should care about is that these combat situations are broken.

[Frostfang.5109]

For me it seemed that the elites heal if u move to a floor lower than them.

[Batelle.1680]

@tigirius.9014 said:Yeah was never interested in that mount it doesn't really make the game more enjoyable for me and the requirements are honestly outrageous.

The only "outrageous" requirement is the gold. The collections themselves are pretty short and, one bounty aside, require nothing any more strenuous than you'd encounter while doing map completion. Even the thing the OP is complaining about isn't bad at all- plus you can leave the instance between fights if you need to. I knocked the library out in less than half an hour- including the fights and the chests.

[Jheo.3015]

The elites and mobs on the library do have some bugs on their aggro radius... some of them I can do a staring contest and they won´t even blink while some will attack you once then will de-aggro after 4 steps, I am not complaining about it though, haha maybe because I am tired of fighting elites and do not want to be bothered by the normal ones.

On fighting elites, you have to check their ablities before you engage (their ability icons actually have some tips), they do not have a large aggro radius.I find them not hard and not too easy, just time consuming and maybe because I am chrono so I do not know how fast other specs can kill these mobs.

[Malediktus.9250]

1) 250 gold is not mich anymore nowadays. That is like 10 days worth of t4 fractal dailies at most. It is also a good sink, it already removed over 10 million gold from the economy so far.2) 10 elites is not hard. You can kill one at a time and they are less dangerouns than elites in dungeons or open world events.

[Zenith.7301]

I would be more pissed at the fact that instead of using actual demons/titans/margonites, they recycled shadow beasts because they can't be bothered to make new models in time.