Your thoughts on the Titan Hard Mode quests

Well, coding A.I. is probably much more difficult than changing level, skill, etc.

I'd been staying out of this topic until I found time to finish these quests. Now that I have, comments:

In general, I was not particularly pleased.. While I rather liked the Galrath quest, these felt like a return to "cheese" difficulty and an awful example of forcing the player into very narrow build-wars-ed setups. It really feels like the devs are trying to push us into the meta spirit+mesmer casterway builds for these quests.

Some more specific thoughts:

• Way too much wtfpwn damage. Several of the titans and a few of the charr were given so much damage they could 1-hit a character from full/nearly-full health. This is awful design because it pretty much forces you to run ST/SY/ER. Having monsters hit hard enough to make heavy prot relevant promotes good play; having them hit so hard it makes heavy prot absolutely mandatory is tiresome and frustrating, especially when a single break in the prot usually leads to immediate death. This is compounded by the hosers for enchants (smash) and melee (see below) that really push the player towards ST. And it's not exactly like we need more people running ST all of the time...
• Ridiculous armor forces the player to use armor-ignoring damage. This has been a problem since the beginning of hard mode (and even before), but the armor levels on these guys really takes it to an extreme. When spirits auto-attack harder than warriors, it should be no surprise that people use spiritway.
• Ridiculous casters encourage mesmerway. The healer titans in DDF, the plant titan babies, and a bunch of overpowered casters in general all cry out for AoE shutdown -- Fevered Dreams, Psychic Instability, and especially Panic. And it's not like we need more people running Panic either...
• Melee hosers on the plant titans pretty much force the player not to run any melee. Wild Growths lay down enough traps to insta-kill melee. Even if you manage to stand next to a titan without dying, Blurred Vision+Dust Trap keeps you from hitting. Flame Burst+Lava Font creates a similar problem.
• Strong removal on the charr force the player to either not run debuffs (and therefore use more defensive buffs... cough cough ST/SY/ER) or try to preemptively shut down the removal (with Panic/FD). Really, whose idea was it to pit us against a group with a Expel Hexes guy, plus a Restore Conditions guy, plus a WoH+Infuse+Cure Hex guy, all with the HM recharge bonus? How are we supposed to get stuff to stick to these mobs? Well, Panic(/Panic+FD) stops enough of the removal to make stuff stick well enough. But I don't really want to be forced into Panic. The other alternative is to give up on debuffing, and rely more on defensive buffs. Which means stacking together 2 or 3 of ST/SY/ER to pick up the slack.
• NPC's are too vulnerable to bad luck.
  • LDD is remarkably frustrating because of the strong chance of the king and/or his priest dying without any chance of saving them.
    
    About 2/3 of the time, you get 3 char groups on the way to the king instead of 2; and about 2/3 of those times, the third group cannot be pulled without triggering the king. This pretty much guarantees failure because, (1) if you stop to kill the charr, the king dies, (2) if you try to run past, they usually bodyblock and kill a hero or two, and (3) if you successfully run past, it means bringing down 3 extra charr on the king's group, and they really can't endure any more damage. Might as well map back to town if that third group is there and out of bow range.
    
    Assuming you don't get that damned third group in the way, you've got maybe a 60% chance that the priest will live long enough for you to reach him. Maybe it's possible to do this quest without the priest's heals, but I doubt it. So, again, there's a good chance you may have lost before you even start.
    
    (The remainder of the quest also requires a bit of luck in not getting a mob with too many rit healers in it, and getting the armageddon lords to smash spirits/minions/the king instead of your backline (or shelter itself). All in all, LDD was a very frustrating exercise in repetition until the spawns came up right and the priest didn't die both during the same attempt.)
    
    
  • Greywind + traps = fail.
    
    
  • Evenina can and should be ignored.
    
    
• Giving the monsters Panic is really cruel to 7H players. Yes, I know you can bait them into wasting their first cast on a puller, then kill them/shut them down before they cast a second time, but it gets really old by the 6th or 7th mob. It doesn't help that the penalty for letting them land a single Panic on your bunched heroes is usually a bunch of deaths, if not a wipe. (I wouldn't mind a group with Panic here and there to keep us on our toes, but trekking halfway across the shiverpeaks while stopping to flag heroes and bait Panic for almost every damn mob on the way is just too much.)
• The DFF titans lack a reasonable kill order. Waaaay back when PvE was meant as PvP training, the titans in Hell's Precipice were a lesson in targeting priority -- The high-threat titans left no babies, the medium-threat titans left low-threat babies, and the low-threat, bad-baby-leaving titans could be debuffed and ignored for a minute. The other quests largely stick to this, but DFF's mobs are a clusterfarque now matter how you cut it. Leave a frost titan alive and it strips your prot, then blows you up with huge damage; kill it and you're stuck with an extra malice running around. Leave a malice alive and sooner or later it lands Panic in the right place and kills you all; kill it and you build up a pile of hearts. Leave a heart alive, and they start to pile up and make it very hard to get kills; try to kill it and the frost titans and malices kill you first. At least the warriors and necros aren't so bad...
• Courier Falken + DNKP = Dead Courier Falken. This is probably the hardest thing in GW right now. I didn't even try to save him... Anyone feeling brave enough to try?
• The Shining Blade dudes are so strong that Defend Denravi is almost too easy. Seriously, they're almost able to beat the titans without you.
• The Titan Source bosses are more aggressive than in the original version of the quest. It's remarkably easy to pull them off from their group for an easy kill.
• The rewards were pretty generous. It almost makes up for how lame they were the first time around.

So it's a bad thing that people are encouraged to actually run good builds for once?

Nothing you sum up is actually new, yes prots are overpowered, armor ignoring damage is the best, parties usually consist of casters ect..., this has been the case for a while now. It only makes sense to utilise this in quests which are supposed to be some of the hardest.

These quests are perfectly doable with 7 heroes and even more with a party of human players.

Good builds =/= lame cookie cutter trash.

As Jeydra pointed out:

Running lame OP PvE trash makes these quests a walk in the park with almost no need for micro whatsoever. Running a more fun/balanced build results on you dying, without any chance whatsoever.

Obviously people should be punished for running bad bars. However, if the game has come to a state of: "Run this and this or die" it begs to wonder what the point in every other skill of this game is.

For me, and clearly for Chthon aswell, these quests were nothing more than a chore. Modding your build untill you have the right amount of build wars, without any regards to your personal skill level (70% build, 1% not being bad at GW, 29% getting lucky on the spawns).

The AI is still too bad to make these quests enjoyable. Anet tries to make up for this fact by an incredible increase in their power This only results in putting even more stress in abusing their bad AI. (Which brings us again to the trash pve gimmicks)

People who find these quests challenging lack terminology. These quests are so incredibly static, you simply can not call it challenging, it's all a matter of rince/repeating untill you get that good build wars, which in my book is not challenging.

Quoted for truth.
Could only add:

Challenge =/= HM treatement*.
Not in the way it is atm at least imo.


*The previously said armor and blablabla useless/mindless mob buff.

Seriously what else did you expect?
It's no new content, it are the same quests as before just buffed.

We probably have different views on "enjoyable" but I call running underpowered builds for the sake of "fun" just plain stupid. This are some of the few quests which put your rit and mesmer heroes to a real test, take a look at the monster builds and don't complain that lesser builds obviously aren't going to cut it.

I didn't expect anything else, but this doesn't mean we can't be diappointed.
Also you get the point. Those quests test your mes, rit and prolly nec heroes, plus the one of the player but you can't chage it, so isn't that important. So 3 profs out of 10. wow.

I agree, it is healthy and refreshing to have a meta where the majority of skills and mechanics are outmoded and insists that we play paint-by-numbers with the same crayons over and over.

Once again nothing new, this has been so for ages.
There will always be meta builds, people should have realised this by now after 6 years of GW. Most of the people run meta builds because it's the most efficient and smartest thing to do obviously.
I don't see the relation between hate for meta builds and the titan quests.
If you have problems with the current state of the game take it out on a skill balance, these quests offer little to no room for ANet to be innovative or change skills around, they are made to relive certain "key" moments from GW1.

Precisely.

You guys can complain all you want, but unless you can actually design a mission that's difficult but not impossible, you should just hold your peace. Complaining about "fun / balanced builds" is silly too. It's highly subjective. What if I told you I find it "fun" to run the "super-balanced" build where an E/Mo for example has points into Air, Water, Fire, Earth, Energy Storage, Healing Prayers, Protection Prayers and Smiting Prayers, along with one skill from each attribute line?

Please remember that these quests were made to be difficult. Of course they require power builds. And there's no "run this or you die". You can go without any single skill / template and still make it.

@Cthon - you really shouldn't complain about Panic too. Panic is only deadly against bad players. Those who flag heroes apart will NOT have trouble with Panic. Call it annoying? Long stretch, but maybe. Call it cruel? Definitely not.

Agreed with you there Jeydra.

OMG i have to put in teh effortz to beat a quest thatz suposed to b hard oh noes!!111!!!!

Give me a break...

There's a difference between encouraging good builds and forcing people into a very narrow solution set because nothing else works.

Give us foes that hit for 100+ semi-regularly, and we learn to bring heavy prot. Give us foes that hit for 400+ semi-regularly, and you make it mandatory.

Give us foes that remove hexes, and we learn to cover and bait removal. Give us foes with Expel Hexes on half the normal recharge, and we give up on using hexes at all. (Or we use Panic/FD to make them stick.)

Give us a reasonable amount of melee hate and we learn to clean our melee. Give us foes with insta-kill PB damage and we give up on using melee at all.

Really? Can you do it without the damage-capped-at-X%-of-max-hp mechanic and without SY? I'd say that having one or the other of those is "run this or you die."

I find having to flag for almost every single mob during a looong walk to be very annoying. Apparently you have a higher tolerance for flagging.

First of all, you don't have to bring ST or SY to beat these quests, I beat them easily without, by letting Spirits and Minions migrate most of the damage, you know the standard tactic.

Second, what's wrong with letting people take specific skills for certain missions? There is some huge damage in the Titan Quests yes, so you take prots, that's only naturally. When going up against Duncan you probably take Swap. When facing lots of the same foes you take EoE. When facing Shining Blade or Stone Summit on HM you might want to take FS.
All of the above skills aren't by any means necessary to beat those foes, but they sure help a lot. Now how can that be a bad thing? Sounds more like common sense and tactics to me.

You make the false assumption that these quests can only be completed by meta builds. This is false, you can easily complete is with lesser to good builds, but don't go crying when you fail. And if you really struggle we still have tons of cons to our disposal, everybody can beat these quests with decent builds and cons.

In other words, the meat shield wall won, you just helped?

Yes, as it does in all other missions and quests for everyone who runs minions.
Besides, I'm playing ele, I have no purpose in HM except support.

Show me a screenshot of these quests beat with no Prot Spirit, Prot Bond, Shelter, or SY! on any of the bars.

Im almost disappointed reading all this....

A return to the "bad cheese" hard, and not the much better "wik" hard...

To the point i probably wont bother with them when i do get spare time to log and play..

There is no single skill or template that you have to run. I can go without Prot Spirit if I have Shelter or Prot Bond, and vice versa. Same applies to SY. I'm also not convinced that SYG + ToF / TNTF can't handle the damage. Actually I might be able to go without Prot Spirit entirely because I don't remember micro'ing it often, if at all, but that's off the point.

If you find that annoying then yes, I do have a higher tolerance for flagging.

Agreeing with MArcSinus.

It's supposed to be difficult, and they do the best they can without attempting to modify the AI, which isn't that easy. AI Coding is much more complex, and I don't believe that will be changed. Thus, they do as much as they can. Jeydra puts it rather effectively.

If you're complaining about using certain skills, there's about 5 combinations of skills that mitigate damage on a serious level. Prot Spirit, Prot Bond, Shelter, SY, and SYG + ToF/TNTF. There's several areas you'll need those to survive. It's not new. They're not forcing your hand, but they're putting hard content to where you need to use the best skills to make it. If they made quests that could be done with any skills, then it's probably not going to be hard at all!

If you want something difficult and challenging, then offer up ways to do it without modifying the AI, unless you're experienced in AI coding and want to go apply at ANet. As I see it, this is about the only method to do it. And it'll be challenging for most people, just as the DoA is challenging for most people.

Basically, /agree with Jeydra and the other related posts.

I thought it was fine, and fitting difficulty. Enjoyed it, raged, and would do it again with friends to help.


But knowing that some of the people on ANET read these forums, John will get the retarded idea that this needs to be made easier cause sooooo many complain. Sigh.