Domain Of Anguish

I've made it through City and almost through Stygian before at least 3 of our team members dropped, one of whom was me. We were at the maw section when I D/C'ed (as the prot monk) making it near impossible for the group to continue.

That's sort of the point. You're not beating the monsters by fighting them, you're beating them by exploiting their terrible pathfinding AI. Every group I've heard of that's beaten an area has done it by using a 'tank' to hug a wall to bodyblock the monsters' terrible pathfinding so that the rest of their team can beat on the monsters in relative safety because the monsters switching targets doesn't do any good when you can walk two steps back and be out of range with them unable to follow. I suppose in that sense the builds aren't cookie cutter because once you've got the exploit down anything that can deal enough damage to beat the enemy monks is successful. But is that really fun?

I feel like Arenanet is unwilling or unable to fix the AI bugs/exploits so instead they've made it so that you have to use those exploits in order to win. Add in that the areas are too long, you can't experiment with henchmen, the non-chest drops suck (except for the very end where you get some greens), and the gemstone drops are way too infrequent (four gems for completing a 4-5 hour area when you need 100 for a tormented item is nuts) and I'm rapidly losing my interest. I think I'll just do a few chest runs for a couple of those unique skins and live with that.

I’ll agree Anet needs to fix it, I mean it’s supposed to be a challenging area right. They should add in another special monster skill that give monster AI casters increased range by 80%.

Then go play PvP. "Smart" AI is extremely difficult to program. FPS's contain arguably the smartest enemy AI's, and even then, it still comes down to preprogrammed patterns (just that they will react and adjust based on the player's actions). Ultimately, the player can still figure out how the AI will react and play accordinly. If you want extremely dynamic battles, the only place that's possible is against real people.

Apparently you had probably both a crappy tank who didn't know how to body block and a Ritualist who thinks Ritual Lord is better than Soul Twisting. I beat the City using 1 Mystical Balthazar Dervish, me (GC + Winter + SV/AV), 1 BiP, 1 SS, 1 WoH monk, 2 SF nukers (one who dropped an hour in), and a Soul Twisting Spirit Spammer. Our Ritualist was great; he used a combo of Displacement, Union, and Shelter.

LOL,

So since we are weaker and need to appear strong ... the entire party should type /flex in front of the mobs? Perhaps since they are larger groups we should be more mobile and all bring charge? I for one am not going to pick up the non max white weapons they drop to use against them. The Art of War would only help if they were a thinking adversary

The mission is difficult no matter how anyone wants to portray it. Is it worth doing is the question.

Well down to two districts wonder how many by friday.... I think this is the first time a new area has opend up that floped so quickly. Everyone seems annoyed, mostly chest runing groups forming up now. Yeah and dont forget this is supposed to be fun.


After about 300 tries or so at the city mission I finaly got to see the gates of the city.... Pulled the first mob out and poof error 7 gg lost our heal monk 2 and half hrs of work... yes WORK down the drain. Failing a quest after several tries due to error7 ... yes we know your working to fix that simply isnt fun its insanely annoying... Every single group that I have been with that has done semi decently has had an error 7 ususally looseing a crucial person in our build resulting in us simply haveing to resign and start over again. This could be eased some by haveing a larger team size say 12 people then if your skilled you can afford to loose one tank because there is room for 2, you could even afford to loose a monk to error 7 if you set up correctly but as it is now. Looseing one player could mean no heals no tank no damage after several hrs of work.


Again I ask Gaile are you still laughing? We are not... I realy cant decide which is more difficult the hrs and hrs spent trying to join a pug group with a clue some paitence and that wont bicker like 4 year olds or the mission/quests itself.

Seem to me that peoples figured out what builds it take to make it in DoA. I only wish i found the right group (or time in that matter) to explore DoA.

I've been hearing rangers are much needed in Domain of Anguish, something to do with changing attacks to cold damage. Either way I'm at the moment trying to get my ranger there at a rapid speed to either trap or use winter on them.

I dont care what people say, I simply not whine and try until I am able to finish the quests.

come on, people have already been able to beat city, stygian and torment areas, why wont people stop whining and try harder?

P.D. communication is very important, as well as the basics of aggro. I.E. making the tank hold aggro some seconds before the mobs see the enemy group is crucial to be able to hold aggro more.

there are several techniques, as well as strategies that help each area in a different way, so why do people still complain instead of thinking of ways to overcome each area by itself??

I am a Tank myself for example, and learning how to hold aggro, as well as having a build that can hold damage as long enough is crucial for survivability. lets take for example the first margonite mob of stygian.

With doylak, endure pain, signet of stamina, mantra of flame, as well as stand your ground from a paragon, and a spell breaker before aggroing the group, i can say that I was able to withstand at least 6 seconds+ by myself, enough time to hold aggro mob and my team able to wipe the first mob, 0 casualities, and apparently a good start.

please people, areas are not impossible, they are just a challenge onwards for people wanting rewards.

those who whine shall not be awarded with end game loot

Hmm, it looks like someone just posted that they were able to beat Stygian Veil with 2 people + 6 heroes.

Not confirmed yet, but if its true, then it just shows that this mission working correctly.

I don't care about smart AI, I care about AI that can walk two steps to the left to get around an obstruction. It's not rocket science. More importantly, I wasn't so much complaining about the AI directly as I was that they try to band-aid it by making it as hard as possible to play without exploiting those AI bugs. If you're the kind of player who has fun actually fighting the monsters, you will have a miserable time in the Domain of Anguish because actually attempting to fight the monsters is suicidal. You are forced to hug the walls, bodyblock, and play those stupid AI games to kill as many monsters as possible without actually fighting them.

Anyone has beat the quest yet?

I want to confirm some things about the "Mission" since i have little information about it.

Well, you already have that though. You can do that through all of Nightfall. The torment monsters were fairly difficult, and you can still engage them in all out combat. However, how do you propose to up the difficulty then? You can either make the AI smarter (which is incredibly hard to do), or you can just up the damage. If you can propose a better alternative, I'm sure people are willing to listen.

Anyone know what the coffer does? Please no hypothetical answers. If someone knows, please reply. I've read much of this post but may have missed it.

Yeah, Greater Conflaguration and Winter are being used with Mantra of Frost to mitigate the high damage until some good shutdown builds are hammered out. Not being used on every trip, but it's a simple and effective means to lower the baddies damage output.

Sorry to hear your parties are having connection problems. I've been lucky in that I haven't seen anyone err=7 in any of my parties,...and if the group makeup is bad we've seem to discover quite quickly where the weak link is and start over. I certainly haven't seen any group having to take more than 10 minutes to form and start the quest.

Your comment though on the area flopping though is ludicrous. Maybe there are 2 districts right now. Then again it's very early afternoon on a Monday right now in the US, and peolple work, go to school, etc. Apart from this thread, I haven't seen anyone annoyed. Then again those that are happy with DoA as it is are probably in it, rather than posting about it.

It's fine how it is. Doesn't seem to me to be any more difficult than UW.

Some of these post remind me of a poster back on the official guildwars forum back during the beta of Prophecies. Simply would not stop posting incessantly over and over on the difficulty level of The Wilds mission. How it did not appeal to the casual gamer in the least,.. would alienate most of the player base, etc. etc. etc. Can't remember the name of that guy but I'm beginning to think he's still playing GW, and still posting.

ARGH im so stupid me and sum guildies got right through the first quest killed the boss etc with 1 leaver and i didnt take the stinking quest at the outpost so i have to do all ova again!!!

There's a screenshot of a team beating the city and killing the bosses in the Screenshot forum.

I've been on a team that cleared the city. One of our members got one of the green armors for her heroes. Other than that... I have no information.

I hadn't been lucky enough to get a gemstone drop randomly but I've seen several people that have, and up to 4 drop in the city quest before it's completion, that seems consistent with the drop rate of other valuable (more than ecto drops on my last runs in UW, a bit less than the total Obsi Shard drops on my last FoW runs).

Another poster has already directed you to some places where you can see proof where some have already completed the cities quest and maybe others, I haven't looked. They're not alone either.

I've been thinking about some comments Gaile made recently about Lightbringer and Sunspear title ranks and plans they have in the future for them. Has anyone taken into account how some of these "cool ideas" they have for the as of right now, legitimately unreachable max levels of these titles might effect the difficulty of the DoA? Especially Lightbringer.

I have a feeling that some of the future bonuses of having high Lightbringer will directly effect how people see the Domain of Anguish.

You can't be serious. Are you serious? I hope you're not serious, because this is just ludicrous.

Looks like the Winter/Conflagration/Mantra of Frost is now the one and only for DoA. Good luck getting a group unless you fall into this mold.

What's wrong with Winter/Conflagration/Mantra of Frost?

Mantra of Frost is a core skill, every class can get that by switching to a mesmer secondary. It's one skill in your skillbar. You also only need 1 ranger or ranger secondary with Greater Conflagration/Winter. 1 out of 8 members of your party. Everyone else can be whatever the heck they want.

Not to mention, just because its one of the more prominent methods discovered so far doesn't mean more viable builds won't come out.

Another problem is people have time constraints and can't always spend 2-5 hours to complete a part of the quest. So party members drop out depending the class off the player more often than not determines how much further the can group go.

uhh, we beat 3 areas just fine without GC/Winter/MoF

Here you go spikey

Yea I was the heal monk...i know there will always be err 7 problems but this is ridiculous...we were doing fine and then poof bye bye

It's an easy build to mindlessly follow, so yes the masses love it. It provides damage reduction easily for the whole group and is effective. Not a bad build, don't get me wrong, but more used because of its easiness with its effectiveness. But the only? There are plenty of other builds out there that get the job done much more efficiently and even quicker, but they require more planning, skill knowledge, and non-elitism that certain professions don't belong in DoA. These things aren't generally common in PuGs.

I've done a ton of different builds for DoA already, most being MoF since it's the flavor of the moment and not many are willing to experiment with anything else, but in truth the best group I have been in was:

3 Eles
2 Monks
2 Assassins
1 Paragon

I was the boon/prot monk and I had unlimited energy. It was far superior to any MoF group I had been in so far. We didn't even need Meteor Shower or traps to kill things. The only problem is that not everyone has 4+ hours to spend on these quests, and finding a group that can is even harder than finding a group that is effective.

I don't care about the holy W/Mo/E trinity or about the mindnumbing predefined roles. TBH, my warrior beat Nightfall with *no* MM and *no* nuker. In most places I was using only one healer. Similarly I was using multiple copies of the new professions. So, I'm more than willing to adapt, and to improve. If you reread my post you'll see it's not yet another "who moved my cheese" post. I have legitimate grudges against the DoA, even if I acknowledge all the players who are spending countless hours grinding for gemstones.

The DoA should be beatable with a consistent mix of all professions, and it should not rely on cheap gimmicks (read: you can't win unless you have skill X+Y+Z, or unless you have role Y filled). That's precisely the main design flaw of the DoA. With such a show of brute monster force, the winning cookie-cutter build will likely use only half the existing professions. Worse, these professions will be confined into specific and boring roles (examples from the past: ranger = barrage or trapper, mesmers unwelcome in SF). As for the others, they picked the wrong profession and they are invited to start over NF with a profession useful in DoA.

I won't even mention the 3 to 5 hours needed to complete a single quest. It's great to see super-long content such as UW domination for the true hardcore players, but it would be even better to have something more accessible for the average player who does not have so much spare time. Reality check: in their current form, the "elite" missions are just a WoW dungeon.

One of the great features of Sorrow's Furnace was that even the dumbest player could enter and explore it and do easy quests. Decent or average players could do all quests (including Final Assault) with a minimum of thinking, and excellent players could farm everything in smaller groups. Whatever your profession, and whatever the role you wanted to play, you could find your way into SF, even if hardcore farmers took a bigger and well-deserved share of the loot with cookie cutter tricks.

With DoA-like elite missions you are drastically limited. Again, it's not a probem of difficulty, it's a problem of options and different game content for different players. That's why I still love SF after all these months, and I think DoA is sloppy game design.

No, my list was a non-exhaustive list the environmental+skill tricks used to prevent players from using a natural strategy. Ex: one environmental effect punishes all players for attacking or using skills (it's bad for spellcasters, but *offensive* energy-based W/A/R are junk in the city). Another environmental effect punishes players for kiting which is a very basic strategy. In short, the main engine behind the DoA difficulty is to prevent players from playing (remove their energy, damage them if they try to mitigate damage...). As a result, players are more or less forced to exploit poor AI flaws instead of playing the game (see Mysterial's post).

Oh really?

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...php?t=10085949
http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...php?t=10085823
http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...php?t=10085279
http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...php?t=10085135

GG, better luck next post

And in a few weeks, Anet nerfs mantra of frost.

Sure I'm serious! How much can those Aataxes hit your Ele for hmm? The Ele's in this place don't hit for that much more, and the meleers for for alot less I think.

The MoF build is an easy damage mitigation tool, but other builds will come out. I stepped in one round as an Obsi Flesh tanker on my Ele and did ok for my part, but I prefer to kill stuff.

Mitigate the damage being done to yourself one way or another and kill the monks. The mobs fold up pretty soon after that.

Since I have not actually completed any quests (read: walked in the door and got pwned, stumbled out to farm LB and think about what I'm doing with my life), are they like SF, UW and FoW quests, where they are repeatable with the same reward (chest at the end, etc)?

I started a Monk (1 year ago) for that reason.

Have you seen the party makeups of the people who have beaten some of the quests? Pretty much every profession has been in one of the parties or more. Not to mention, only some of them use the winter + greater conflagaration +mof core. People have used both dervishes and assassins to substitute as tanks (dervish and assassin also can do some funny things while tanking too). I posted earlier a list of all the professions and so far what I've seen works with them. Most of the classes have quite a few different options, and that's just what I've seen. I'm sure there are a lot of other groups using very different builds. One group I've heard uses frenzy warriors against the touch necros because the life stealing skills do not double against frenzy. (They're also bonded and protted against normal damage). MoF doesn't not exclude any professions, since every profession can change to a mesmer secondary without really hampering their build. If they're too reliant on their secondary, they can opt not to use MoF and just stay in the very back, and get protted before casting their spells. Mesmers are extremely useful here, as their spiritual pain + mistrust is great at doing AoE armor ignoring damage, and provide damage mitigation through disruption. The rest of their skillbar is free to provide whatever utility the situation requires.

This I'd agree with to some extent. 3-5 hours is a long time for most players. Maybe they should add shorter quests with lesser rewards for those without too much free time, but still want to get a taste of conquering at least a part of DoA. Otherwise, I think there needs to be a truly hard area.

May I say you rock I would group with anyone on that team again anytime. Sucks so bad that you errored out we would I suspect come very close if not finished city. Most amazing battery I have ever seen with us on that team as well ect.... ect.... Kudo's to all of ya!!

I still think the area needs an increase in player size just for the saftey net of loosing one important "gear from the "clock". This might apease everyone increasing the team size... Those that want it harder simply dont fill your team up, those that dont fill it up... This way the difficulty is controllable somewhat for everyone.. I honestly dont think it would be intensely easy with 12 people but with 8 people every last skill and every last character is NEEDED at the very top of there game to compleate these areas.

So I ask that anet seriously consider at least increaseing the team size in this area to 10 or 12 players. This would make this area alot more apealing for a larger portion of your players. It would speed up the time that it takes to compleate the mission for a team of this size makeing error 7s less of a big deal, allowing people to controll how difficult they wish the area to be for themselves.... I dont know about you guys but to me this is a win win fix.

Mantra of Frost isn't imbalanced in PvP. So there will be no nerf.

It's being used properly in pve, albeit gimmicky, its hardly an exploit and hardly an abuse.

I am still waiting for the first Winter+GC+MoF groups to pop up in HA/GvG.

People tried that AGES ago. It doesn't work because Conflag is too hard to keep up reliably.

Yeah I know. The combo sucks in my opinion. I'm just waiting for it to appear since it works in DoA.

NEW UPDATE

If a party of AI enter in the area of effect of a GC and a winter they will assign a caster to kill it with one shot of their overpowered wand attack.


Gg =)