Nightfall too hard? Spoiler Warning!

Warning! This post contains some spoilers.

Is it just me or are certain areas of the game too hard? I played over 1400 hours of Guild wars so i have a lot of skills unlocked but can´t complete certain missions like Rilohn refuge. I mean how are you supposed to take down a earth ele boss that already does huge damage when you have a constant aura that increases damage dealt to you on top of all the other damage. Or for example the Mission after that in the caves where the archers before the bosses spike your monks in one shot? Or the defend that city missions with that overwhelming force incoming? Or capping searing flames against those one shot kill fire eles...
Ok i made all those missions with the help of a good mesmer and some guildies but how are new people supposed to beat those with only some basic skills and their henchies? They don´t know the specific counterbuilds required in those missions in the first place, they just want to play the game and have fun and even if they did know, the henchies just aren´t up to the task.
Even with heroes i seem to have no chance to advance the game by myself, so whats the point to them? And finding a PUG nowadays is nearly impossible since everyone plays by himself.
I think a lot of people will get frustrated with the huge knowledge and skill required to progress in the second half of the game and just give up on Guild wars. I know i already went back to other games cause playing for an hour to get to the end of a mission only to have the entire group spiked in under 2 seconds by a sandstorm isn´t funny. Such things can be put into optional content like elite missions but the campaign should be doable by a player of average skill like myself and probably many others.
Its sad because i think Nightfall is a very good game but its very frustrating for players like me. This probably sounds like a rant and probably it is but i just wanted to express my dissappointment in not being able to have fun because of certain design decisions i just find ridiculous.

Well you got plenty of shutdown attacks you can do and armor increases. Monks with Prot Spirit and Shield of Absorption. Warriors with Dolyak Signet, Ele's with Ward Against Elements, Kinetic Armor, Armor of Earth (a basic earth spell). Mesmers with Backfire, and Guilt etc. Rangers with the beautiful Broadhead Arrow, put that on a ranger hero and he's down for the count. The people that don't have this stuff, will learn of it and try to get it, if they can't they will find another way. Learn by failing.

It's just you. Nightfall is the easiest of the series so far. Learn how to control your hench and heroes. Flag placement is crucial in many missions. As is selecting the correct party/skill makeup.

I've completed the game entire game using heroes and henchies, and I even got masters on every mission. (the only missions I did with humans players are the 2 last missions, but I'm sure those can be completed with heroes and henchmen as well.) So I'm definitely sure the entire game can be completed using only heroes and henchmen.

In my opinion, I wish the game were harder. I thought it was pretty easy until you got to Realm of Torment. I can understand that people completely new to Guild Wars might have difficulty, especially when it comes to building effective builds, but I don't think Anet should always cater to completely new players. Most of the people playing Nightfall has played Factions and Prophecies, and we want new challenging content. We don't want missions or quests we can just dance right through without worry.

The Drought is plain easyness, Arcane Thievery + Diversion + Arcane Larceny + Broadhead Arrow = Byebye drought.

Anyway, i agree with some parts being overly hard, i mean wtf killing a boss that is only suspectible to attacks for 10 seconds with lots of margonites coming at you? =|

Another example, Dasha Vestibule mission. Goren dies. Goren dies. Goren dies. Goren doesn't die, you get owned by fire djinn boss. You don't die Goren doesn't either, mission completed. Great, now you can do attack at the kodash. Party gets wiped, lots of Margonites on Kodash Forum. Pwnd.

All I got to say about that mission is this: Winter + Spinal Shivers + Elemental weapon mods = FTW

Seriously, we laid waste to that mission.

You can put flag under that "ramp" or whatever it is called. Then those Kourman archers in top can't shoot you.

It sounds like 90% of the problems in this thread can be solved by Protective Spirit.

100% of the problems in this thread can be solved with taking the right builds.

You all postet great counter builds but like i said a lot those skills aren´t available to new players. And heroes don´t use a lot of them correctly without huge amounts of micro. I made those missions with some of my guildies(who played thousands of hours and are therefore very good) but died a lot trying to solo them when nobody was around and you are forced to bring specific counters unlike in prophecies. This makes progression extremely hard for new/average players. You should have a chance without being forced to rely on complicated build combinations. It may seem easy for experienced players with deep knowledge of build creation but everyone else will simply see an unsurmountable obstacle and put the game on the shelf never touching it again. Wasting an hour only to die in 2 seconds is like a slap in the face. You don´t think its a challenge anymore you just think its a cheap way to kill players using bosses that seem like they are in godmode. You can put such bosses in the game if you make them like shiro where you can instantly fight him again if you fail but don´t put such things on the end of a long mission cause its frustrating.

I do grab PUs if I see em. Most of the time I get someplace and no one is around or not interested in doing what I happen to be doing. I don't sit around doing LFG for hours on end. I either go with guildies, allies, or if I see a few PUGs (I'll Admit this is rare) But in general near the end of the game. especially the last few missions, Heroes are really no fun to play with. sure its doable, but I for one prefer a large team play for these kinds of areas. I think this will always be the case, because of 2 reasons. going with a full party improves mission time, and improves drop rates, cause you don't have heroes and henchies eating up potential drops...

Prophecies only

Prophecies only.

Factions only elite.

You didn't dispell the "how will new players be able to know how to counter this?" at all, in fact you compounded it by listing half your skills as ones requiring the two other chapters plus two elites.

Prophecies only.

Factions only.

Which require both other chapters. I challenge you people to put together one from core and Nightfall only skills.

for the first 1 bring winter. for the 2nd 1 bring shields up. for the 3rd 1 dont wait for them to come to u. for the searing flame guys i dont kno. bring mantra flame and prot spirit and spirit bond and incoming and stand you ground. those are good for eles.

i hope this helps u. dont get mad cuz other ppl say nf is easy. it is not easy. they just kno how to play now and they didnt before. now they know so now it is easy for them.

gl

too hard? is ridiculously easy. u aren't supposed to beat the final 3 missions, including killing shiro, litch and abaddon, with a full hench team, at first try and without being skilled and knowing what to expect...

propechies and factios were way harder

Seriously? I was wondering about that. I thought Winter was core, may be wrong. Though I could swear one of the hero trainers had it...

Honestly, you really only need Winter, I just added Spinal Shivers as a nice combo, but Winter alone negates that area effect of double damage. But yeah...

I accept you challenge.


This is Hero 1:
[skill]Concussion Shot[/skill] core
[skill]Distracting Shot[/skill] core
[skill]Savage Shot[/skill] core
[skill]Favorable Winds[/skill] core
[skill]Read the Wind[/skill] core

This is Hero 2:
[skill]Arcane Echo[/skill] core
[skill]Frustration[/skill] Nightfall

Today I decided I'd help this guildy, since he was spamming guild chat with the dreaded "CAN NEONE HELP ME PLZ!" over and over, so I did... he needed the Centaur mission done, which I had gotten masters on with henchies. Figured it'd be easy, right?

WRONG. He was new to Guild Wars, and had his heroes set up with basically their default builds (with Healing Breeze and some other useless crap on his Centaur). So we managed to do okay until the end, despite his monk hero being complete rubbish, and we come to the mob of Kournans.

His Zhed gets trashed, since he took out the wards for some inane reason, and his Monk hero's breeze can't heal fast enough (obviously), so the team wipes, and I'm telling him to res his guys, and he's not... so he runs away (without self-healing... XD ), and degens to death.

Afterwards, I asked him if he had Dodge, Lightning Reflexes, Whirling Defense... any defensive stances. He had nothing! The default hero builds aren't very good, and the skills they give new players aren't useful enough. They gave Factions' accounts another Dodge, but not Nightfall.

I agree with the OP... Nightfall isn't exactly fair for new players. There's a lot of things to pick up, and aren't adequatly explained early. And now with heroes, good players can just ignore noobies and finish it themselves... :|

EDIT: I don't have a ranger hero... what then? :|

I've come to the conclusion that Nightfall is, indeed, too hard. Not because I can't beat it - I've put over a thousand hours into the other two chapters, I know what I'm doing - but because it's balanced for returning players, not new ones.

Increased catering to the existing player base at the expense of new players -> dwindling player base

To the OP: I don't know about you but back in the day we had NES games which you had to go all the way through and if you died, you had to start all over again. I'm sure there are people here that are even older who have the same experience on the C64 and such.

A game is supposed to challange you, it's supposed to be enjoyable through difficulty. If it's neither enjoyable and or difficult, then there's nothing there that should keep you from putting the game down.

I have to agree with the OP.
For new players it can be very frustrating.

Some Missions and quest are very difficult without the right build.
And then its not only having the right skills, but also the knowledge on how to use them!

Just look at Kamadan.
The newbies standing there for hours trying to sell weapons for 200 gold...
They need experience first.

Okay okay. Lets look at this arguement in a little more depth:

Thunderhead Keep.

I was about to say "U CAN JUST HENCH IT LOLZ", but then I remembered I was thinkin' of the new players.

But THK is pretty far in, right? People should've figured things out by then... unless I'm totally misunderstanding your comment?

My point is that yes they should have figured things out by then. Well... Go there now and I'm sure there's a bunch of people that still haven't figured it out.

I know of people who've spent 1.5 years playing the game and still don't understand basic concepts such as kiting, damage mitigation, positioning, pulling, etc.

Yes Nightfall is hard, I don't deny that. But so was Prophecies when we all first done it. I remember stepped outside Ascalon city after the searing and getting raped by devourers. The whole point being that of course it's hard as a newbie. Just a better incentive to understand the game more.

I always though Raisu Palace to be the hardest non-elite mission in the game so far. It seems unless you get a good, competent team, you end up getting beat by Shiro'ken eles and rangers(which are the strongest shiro'ken IMO).

The second hardest mission would probably be Vizunah Square, because you know the Factions team is most likely going to suck and you really need to have a good Foreign team to carry the load.

Thunderhead keep is a joke compared to most missions in Nightfall(I easily hench that one) and still people continue to fail at it. Imagine those people in Nightfall missions. The majority of players isn´t that hardcore, they buy a game and enjoy playing through the campaign once, maybe twice if they really like it. Maybe with a friend or two. Do you think they will buy future chapters of the game if their mending warrior gets trashed so hard so early in the game? I know this is an extreme example of noobness but it serves to get the point across.
I try to PUG alot even if it became harder and if we could look at the server logs i bet the failure rate of certain missions is way above what it was in previous campaigns. That or i always just happen to be in the wrong groups cause we die alot.

You obviously shoulda picked your hero's better eh?

Also for people that are new to GW through NF, well that's their problem I'm not and I have all the right skills needed to get by so tough luck to them haha. If they need help I'll help them with my rightly skilled hero's.

I got the Ranger on my Para. :P I wanted to unlock the Ele.

I can see how newer players could have problems with this. Quite a few parts of this game require some counters you may not use elsewhere (though prot spirit is the counter more often than not). The problem newer players will run into is not understanding what happened to them, and even if they do, this game has alot of skills to choose from, so knowing what you need to counter somthing is as much of a problem.

Well DH I'm sure you have Broadhead Arrow unlocked. Should have made him E/R and used him for that .

Yeah! I got so disappointed when I couldn't solo the areas anymore after Pre Sear. The Devourers just owned me. Very depressing that time lol

Bah. I suppose I could've done that...

Heh, teaches people that the Warrior + Monk + Ele isn't all there is to the game.

Also, I'd like to point out that I beat Gate of Pain purely through the help of my level 11 Jin. I don't care what level you are, you can survive anything if your enemy is interrupted.

I consider myself to be a casual player... and except for 1 mission which used a pug (and got failed 4 times in a row) I've managed to finish nightfall with my heros and henchies.. admitedly, this was with my tyrian character. (mesmer, hence no wanting to stand around spamming lfg for hours at a time)

My nightfall character, so far, has no problems with the game.. is lvl18, is at sunspear... the sunspear city on the mainland.. and is about 1000 points off the sunspear title to progress in the game. No non-nightfall skills are on her (she's a necro running blood and I'm outta skill points). The only thing I admit is having heros who have builds that use the unlocked skills over the last 2 campaigns.

Really, a casual player is (should be) more inclined to play with pugs (and therefore people with lots of skills unlocked) than the more non-casual player..

*edit: too late at night to deal with english.. .

When I first started Prophecies I think I actually PUG'ed 90% of the missions, maybe 100%. It was fun and you learnt a lot in PUG's especially if you were new to online games.

I can definitely see the more experienced players taking heroes and henchies through the missions and quests to see everything quickly. Heck, I henched everything, except for 2 missions, but my timezone is pretty quiet at times.

I guess having a better group formation system would help bring newer and older players together. Half the reason for henching is less hassle and older players know they can get through most of the missions with them. A/Net's no subscription fee model is pretty attractive to new online players you would think, but if there isn't really the community ingame to support them then that's going to be a problem.

If you think thats hard, you haven't seen any thing yet from the realm of the torment.

Heh, my Paragon is stuck on the second to last mission. (Running SV, Wild blow, etc. I came close to killing Shiro multiple times but to no avail.)
But seriously, I think Nightfall is much harder than the other two chapters, Prophecies can easily be henced with little or no attention paid, Factions? Just get a good MM. But Nightfall was definatly targeted towards the older player base and, I guess, since it, sort of, ties together both games and seems to bring an end to the "Trilogy" the wanted it to be an enjoyable and challenging game over-all.

The only mission I found particularly difficult was Gate of Madness. It required good pulling/agro techniques (something that wasn't entirely necessary for the previous missions, so I got lazy), and of course Shiro is a pain.

Missions I wasn't able to breeze through without a number of build tweaks with 2 players (1 war, 1 mesmer) and 6 heroes (haven't done the Master of Whispers' Vabbi mission yet):

• Gate of Madness
• Dasha Vestibule (ended up taking 3 eles with Extinguish)
• Jennur's Horde (seriously, wtf is with neverending waves of guys?)

Most of the other missions, if we didn't breeze through on the first try (usually with the bonus), we only screwed it up because of inexperience with the mission (like, we got too close to the citadel in the Cemetery mission).

After beating Nightfall I'd say it's up there in difficulty...

Gates of Madness was crazy. As if closing the portals wasn't fun enough the Lich was curiously a pushover and Shiro was mysteriously stronger. Not to forget the little handicap on healing you have during the whole mission. After doing it 12 or so times, its now one of my favorites to do. I just wish greens were dropping at the end...

But then theres the last level, which IMO is the most intersting of them all. I'd have to say this was one mission where everytime you do it, you never know what might happen in it.

Sometimes we got spammed 4 times in a row by Words of Madness, and at 120 damage each time you'd see how fun that got.

And then other times we got surrounded by Torment Claws. One time we saw all but 4 Torment Claws and almost had Abaddon, but then another time we faced 7 Torment Claws before we even got to Abaddons right hand for the first time.

All I can say is the Hero's come in handy. Without them beating the game would never happen. The Henchies are still a coin toss and getting a PuG would just be frustrating.

But after 3 days of fighting level 24 and 28 mobs I can definately say these last few levels make you a better player. Not only that but determination makes you overcome your enemies.

But after failing so many times you can't imagine the reward of seeing the xp show up on the screen and the mission goes to a cut scene. Best feeling in the world.

rofl ...
I hate the Realm of Torment.
I FINALLY beat Gate of Pain with heros+henchies after like, 15 attempts. At first I just had no idea what to do and then I just kept getting owned because Koss would randomly run into mobs, then ... I realised you can put him on guard and he doesn't do that ... as much.
So, I got the Kormir's Crusade quest, and, too lazy to have to fight ALL those mobs after ridiculous attempts at Gate of Pain, I ran myself all the way to Gate of Madness in an attempt to finish Kormir's Crusade. For some reason I neglected to remember that, zoning yourself during a quest puts the NPCs back where they started. So, I thought I could go into Gate of Madness, come back out, and that spirit would be right there to rescue, but no, I have to do it all over again cause I made an idiotic decision.
Either way.
Realm of Torment is up there in hardness, the rest of the game has been a breeze except for one or two missions. Some of the Master quests are ridiculous in terms of the amount of mobs you have to fight, but once you get the hang of it it's fun.
Guild Wiki comes in handy ... oh yes, very much so.
I think in the forum, where we welcome the newbies, we should make a thread that says "Read Here" and inside simply says "Go study Guild Wiki for the love of god." haha.
No, but it helps, really, and a lot of people don't bother to read up on builds and stuff to see how they can better their chances at succeeding in the game.

Now I'm stuck at Gate of Madness and I'm afraid to even try this mission, A) because finding a real group of people to play these missions with is not only the most ridiculous waste of time, but it fails worse than when I play with heros and henchies. And B) I don't want to fight Shiro again .... haha.

It's funny though, after playing through the game with heros and henchies, you (or at least I) have realised how much I DON'T know about this game, regardless of how long I've played. I'm still learning a lot, and a big part of that has been creating builds for all my heros. The hardest ones are casters because I'm so used to playing warriors and rangers. It's fun though when you create a build and have it work out the way you've planned though. I never really thought about other people's builds in Prophs or Factions (except monks) because I just relied on getting healed so much that I wouldn't have to worry about anything else. Now I at least make an attempt to come as prepared as I can.
Still difficult at times, but I don't think Nightfall is anywhere near as difficult as Prophecies or Factions (Factions especially), except ... for Realm of Torment.
I miss the Prophecies campaign ... I kind of want to play through it again for a refresher.

Haha, I did the exact same thing!