[AC] This is it? Really people?

#1 - April 9, 2013, 3:39 a.m.

After seeing countless posts about how hard it became we decided to finally check it out with our team (as we normally do CoE + TA + CoF + FotM daily) .

I’m sorry but what the hell do people complain about? It became easier everywhere:

1) Kholer can no longer one hit you, you can mess up every time and walk away every time, even the monsters he spawn are a joke and die instantly. I want the old version back, atleast he was more fun.

2) The final boss can’t again kill you at all, especially at path 1 you just circle around him and he won’t even scratch you. Have everyone use their boons properly and you can literally faceroll him. The other paths are no different if everyone knows how to use dodge properly.

I’m sorry but this dungeon is still a joke when it comes to difficulty. I was chatting and watching a movie while doing this dungeon.

Robert, can we please get a real difficulty or “hard mode” added to the dungeons? The explorable content was meant for the raid orientated people, so where is the difficulty? When I’m doing a dungeon I want to feel the tension of it. I want to be pushed to getting every last bit out of my class at every encounter and after finishing the dungeon I want to feel that I actually accomplished something and not wonder what dungeon I will faceroll next.

The above information counts for every dungeon in the game at the moment, even Arah Path 3 after the Dwayna priest nerf.

Can you please stop balancing around the unskilled people and add some difficulty to the dungeons?

p.s. I play ranger and thief so don’t even try to come up with an excuse that I play one of the stronger PvE classes.

Robert Hrouda

#11 - April 9, 2013, 8:16 a.m.

From my perspective, we made the dungeon numerically easier by lowering health pools and damage numbers, but we increased difficulty through complexity of encounters and more use of boons/conditions.

I feel like AC was made easier. It is more forgiving of failing to mitigate damage for the sake of teaching players a lesson that they can recover from. Kohler spin-to-win is probably the best example of this. It’s not a one shot killer any more like it used to be… and while experienced veteran players will find its new lack of threat a bit of a let-down, it’s teaching newer players to utilize their fundamentals more.

My end hope is that there becomes a progression of difficulty within each dungeon from the start of the path to the end, and that each dungeon progressively gets harder and harder from the lowest level dungeon to the highest level dungeons. This won’t come without significant reward work though, as the risk must match the reward in terms of increasing difficulty.

Also as a note, we don’t factor in solo players with our dungeon design. We’re trying to build it for a team of 5 – so if a player can solo it, all the power to them… but we’re not building content so it can be solo’d. I could design things that outright excluded solo players, and I do in some areas with puzzles and traps… but I enjoy watching people rise to the challenge of soloing a tough boss or a dungeon path, and proving that player fundamentals are stronger than numerical values.

Robert Hrouda

#13 - April 9, 2013, 8:57 a.m.

Geoffroy.3685:
However, what do you make of the scavengers chain knock-downs ?

Easily mitigated. I’ve run it more times than you can imagine just in testing and after launch, and the knockdown gravelings can be mitigated multiple ways: dodge roll at the right time, a stunbreaker/teleport (like lightning reflexes), a party member knocking them back off of you, a block… there’s ways to mitigate it, and we reduced their damage since they became more of a CC menace.
There are only two places I feel they can be a real issue in the dungeon: Hodgins library moment, and the Howling King. Just be prepared and save your mitigation techniques for the right moment. Knowing which attacks to soak and which to avoid is a strong lesson to learn when in dungeons.