How difficult would you like your PvE?

More difficult areas is fine, as long as they are accompanied by easy and medium difficulty areas. It's quite simple, really: When I get home from work, and I'm ready to wind down before bed, I want to have an easy-going time, goof off a little, maybe chat a little. If I'm in the mood to actually play, and I mean really play, I prefer a challenge. I seek out trouble, and love getting my ass kicked at those times.

There are enough areas in PvE to satisfy one who wants a challenge. Sure, there could be more, and I'm sure there will be in the future. Keep this in mind, no one is forcing you to play Chahbek Village over and over. All those "super-easy" or even "just not hard enough" areas all over Tyria, Cantha, and Elona don't have to be repeated. Just don't do them.

You want a challenge? Do the challenging areas. You want more of a challenge? Do PvP. If that's not enough, this might not be the game for you.

Qouted

For

Truth

I agree that difficulty would be best created by giving monsters reasonable skill bars (at least in areas that are meant to be difficult), but we all know anet is never going to do that for a reason I'll never understand.

I don't like DoA myself, but I do like RoT's "cheesy environment effects" and lvl 28 self-replicating demons because you still need to think in order to counter them. Pretty much everywhere else you can play a bar with no synergy, have a horrible team set up and gimp yourself with uncustomized weapons or some other nonsense and still breeze through the game. This doesn't work in RoT and that's why I like it. IMO the difficulty is set pretty well, even if it's done by simply cranking up the numbers.

I never said I'm judging anything. I even mentioned that the average poster here is probably more skilled than the average player.

I never said anyone was judging.

Ut oh...unless it was implied, and then I do apologize.

I ,like that of Blame the Monks,want PvE that has the intelligence of that of Heroes,Not the simple 'o hay her u r teh rly hard plaec wit teh high lved monstrs who do rly rly hi dmg' Cop out.

I want dual classed monsters with worthy skill bars and the fighting technique of Heroes.

I want things easy, very easy. I dont want to HAVE TO read the wiki guide just to finish a mission. If i want a challenge ill go solo something.

PVE is way way way too easy, there isn't a single even remotely hard mission in any of the games, or if there is it only "hard" because success is dependent on bad NPC ally AI.

On the other hand, DoA is not "hard", it is simply ludicrously unbalanced against the player. That does not equate to hardness.

PVE should be way harder in a legitimate - not "ludicrously unbalanced against the player" - form of hardness.

The only thing I fear is that "hard mode" will only be accessible after beating the game with that particular character. I want to run through the whole campaign on hard mode on my first time through, so I hope they'll allow for that.

"Hard" mode, whether you like it or not, will most liekly be DoA-style (i.e. DoA style ridiculousness), in order to make it fair for lv. 20s. So good luck leveling there.

Hopefully their adding "hard mode" will prevent them from ever needing to do any more stupid "elite missions" that exclude 98% of the player population from ever going there (as well as locking the only ritualist hero behind it *sigh*), and also encourage them to make the normal missions more attainable. I'm already dreading the Realm of Torment because of the stuff I've read... it sounds terribly un-fun, in the same way the battle with Shiro was un-fun (read as: required a certain build and only a certain build).

More titan quests, Last Day Dawns was the most fun I have ever had as a monk. 4 people, level 28 monsters... my kind of fun. Not level 28 enemies with annoying environmental effects and double-damage dealing bosses. Even still it was a joke, just more frustrating than anything else.

I want:
8 skills
Level 20 enemies
Two professions
Randomly generated groups

Less of:
Enrage
Auto-attacks of 100+ damage to soft targets

Hit it perfectly. I want more challenge, less outright cheating of mechanics. Give monsters decent skillbars and halfway reasonable ways to use them. Giving monsters double damage, or putting in crippling "environmental" effects that the mobs completely ignore, isn't a challenge, it's a cheap and lazy way to make things more difficult. Difficult != challenging.

LOL I like that.One of the reasons I do H/H strickly.I got so tired of Afkers in GWP.

Mass Monster Mobs!

Thats my answer, as I love them so! The monster of course should be quite easy and low levels, but there is nothing I enjoy more than seeing waves of creatures falling down under my wrath upon them, bwahahha

Seriously tho, I do like the missions where a fairly common enemy attacks en mass which not only makes you feel very powerful, but still can have a relatively high difficulty when you get swamped by them. Environment effects are faux-difficulty. Self-replicating high level monsters is just a recipe for frustration.

A good example is this 'difficulty: master' mission: Assault on Beknur Harbor

Fantastic fun watching wave after wave crumbling!

My fear would be of 'farming' these missions tho. My joy would be ZOMBIES in one of these missions :-D

i like the difficulty the way it is, altho i have the feeling Nightfall is the easiest chapter of them all...If i compare Prophecies to NF it seems that Proph. was more difficult

difficulty vs skills

I n order to pass some most difficult levels u need certain professions + specic armor + specific skils + etc etc

This is no fun

Difficulty should be that any combo of newbie + any profession + skills can pull if off It will be difficult but possible

Not like u finsih the entire campaign with an assain come to elite mission only to told " No sins , dont take them , they are useless"

Thanks Anet

If there's a hard mode, I would hope that there isn't any reward there that is intrinsically better than other modes, in the same way that FOW armour isn't intrinsically better than 1.5k.

That way you don't feel forced to play hard mode to get an otherwise inaccessible item that might be really cool but can't be duplicated, like some greens can't be.

A title should be available for hard mode connoisseurs, it's about the bragging after all.

I'm guessing of course that rewards ought to be more substantial, but not where you create a kind of class division between players of different modes.

I'd also agree that forum goers are generally a lot more hardcore than the millions of other Guild Wars players. This is a tiny but vocal minority. Don't mess with the difficulty as is, I know a few players who never even go on guildwiki but love the game and think it's enjoyable as is.

This says it all...i like PvE as it is right now. Some areas hard, some easy, but balanced enough that even if you're not a veteran player, you should still be able to just scrape through to the end.

Please keep the main game as it is, the now legendary 'hard' mode should satisfy those that want to be up against it ALL the time.

More groups like the jade brotherhood ppl. They have a nice group build going on with pretty decent skills. Still fighting them has a smooth feeling to it with every profession you play. I really don't like gimmicks like exploding afflicted making cantha quite an ordeal for assassins. Or stuff that makes everything cost 40% more energy while the mobs are the same retarded margonites. Just toughen up the margonites a bit then.
I love Realm of Torment, because every profession could theoretically shine there. I had fun with my ranger there snaring margonite hammer warriors and interrupting water eles. A mesmer could do a lot of good harrassing casters as wel as melee. Necros can make minions or do other necro thingies. A sin can spike down clerics being unaffected by spell breaker. Warriors can beat the crap out of the baddies like they always do. etc. etc.
Never had any trouble finding groups and I already took 4 chars through.

I think this is an important point...all classes can work well there aswell as in most area's. Once it gets so difficult that not all professions can play their part there you get the elite missions and DoA type of thing...when that happens you can delete half your characters because they will become unplayable throughout a campaign.

It's automatic, as soon as a certain difficulty level is reached half the character classes cannot play there...So in my view, challenging is good but keep it playable for all professions. Gate of Madness is on the border but any team can get away with taking, say an assa or a paragon. And for once a mesmer is very useful there. But the fact that shiro is more difficult to beat than abaddon still surprises me...my assa is stuck there untill enough of my guildies have characters there to help her, cause no one else will take her in the team...I wonder if that is a good thing by any standard in a PvE setting.

Funny, assassin is quite useful against shiro. Vampiric daggers and wild blow will own him. My friend had to kill shiro too, he was on his ranger. Guess what, we made a thumper and wild blowed the crap out of him .

Hard enough to keep the pve crowd spaming im bored cause they rushed the game and find pvp too hard.

Scale everything like Factions and it'll be fine by me.

If the hardest area in the game is set up like Raisu Palace (and the hardest thing you have to deal with is Star Ancient Koosun... <3)...... then thats just perfect.

Any tougher than that and it just becomes a grind of desperation, frustration, anxiety, stress, annoyance.... and eventually complete failure to play at all....
If its somewhere that an Assassin is in constant danger of dying in the midst of a full party then I don't want it. I don't believe the elite areas should exist at all... or at least that they should have their "eliteness" toned down a bit.
Class balance would help hugely there.
The very notion that there are many areas in the game where you cannot survive as certain classes and are essentially forced to use a particular class to get through there..... its FUBAR.... totally FUBAR.


Or at the very least the "elite" areas should be more like Lornar's Pass.... where its simply a shortcut to something better, rather than the only means of getting it.
Those of us with less than serpentine reflexes, a perfect build and a perfect team should be able to get the tougher stuff too.... just by spending more time to take a long (scenic) route....


.... Seriously...
From time to time I start to regret ever beginning with an Assassin as my first character. To try and achieve all that again with another class would make my sacrificed time all but worthless.... but there is so much I just cannot do because of such a simple choice at the beginning.
But I punish myself sorely whenever I begin to have such thoughts. A-Net should not have forced me into a position where I would regret playing a particular class. All classes ought to have a place in all areas... otherwise the populace ends up lacking diversity and it becomes a bore.

*Shrugs*


Like I said.... I spend most of my time in Factions because Cantha is about the level of difficulty (and beauty) I can handle and find entertaining.

So How hard is this Hard Mode going to be and what is it going to be like? Anyone has any info? or is it just gonna be the same old missions again but higher lv mobs?

if it is then i rather do titan quests again for the 5th time :P

I'm a pretty casual player. I've played thru Prof a couple of times. Started Factions, got maybe 1/3 to 1/2 way thru it (yea, I'm a slow poke ). I put this up front because, this may already be in place and I haven't seen it yet.
So please, bear with me.

I think the argument (for me anyway) is not about harder or easier, but one of dynamics.
See, the game mechanics -from what I've seen- haven't really changed all that much. Which is ok, they are fun, but I need a little more 'Whoa! didn't see that coming' type scenarios.
Each area seems to lend itself to certain skill sets. If you equip them then you're good to go. If you don't, well, you can still make it, it's just a bit tougher.
What I'd like to see is maybe that random traveller. Maybe a lost undead travelling where he has no business being. Something that will encourage me to maintain a more balanced skill set. Perhaps he is on a path where he will move from one end of the map to the other. In other words, an atypical pathing scheme.
Or, perhaps the typical monsters will spawn with a skill set that is not what we have come to expect from what we have seen in the past.
These should not be the norm, rather the abnormal.
The other point I'd like to address is the surrounding area. The terrain is beautiful, and, importantly, realistic. But what I would prefer is a little more 'texture' to the land. More choke-points. More corners. More elevation. More tactical terrain where I can use it as a weapon.
I realize not every map should contain these. From what I've seen to date, it's more of the same open battlefield type maps.

Just some thoughts.

-ANoid

EDIT-- Double post, appologies.

I say the whole "Hard Mode" idea should be scrapped. The game in parts is tough enough as it is.
Why bother adding an option to make the manageable parts of the game unmanageable and the already tough parts downright ridiculous... then locking away all kinds of desirable features behind the now unreasonable difficulty? Give Hard Mode tougher henchies and I'd maybe consider it.

I personally believe that Anet has pandered far too much for the elite playes. You notice a trend going from Prophercies to factions to nightfall in which the game has got pregressively harder to play through.

By elite players, I mean those players who would want the entire game to be one big elite mission if they had it their way.

An entire game of like DOA. Players who arent happy unless it takes 10 minutes just to progress 10 feet and you have to kill 100 creatures just to progress. We have elite missions and areas to pamper for those hardcore players, so we dont need an entire game like that.

Unfortunately as the game has been made harder, the AI has suffered and the gameplay has suffered. The game is now frustrating to play because the creatures are so over-powered in certain locations!!

The creatures havent been made harder by making them more intelligent, organised or fun to play against. The trend has been to make them over-powered or increase mob numbers and freqency.

Factions was bad enough when they made virtually every creature capable of interupting you. This made Factions a casting hell.

Nightfall also had creatures which were able to interupt. But they also added creatures capable of ressurecting very fast and even capable of multiply themselves.

Nightfall even topped it off when they added huge numbers in mobs and then basically crambed as many mobs as they could into one area. Making it more like a mine field where you have to watch your every move incase you agro something.

We need to move away from this trend which Anet has of pandering to the elite players. If they have their way, we will end up with a game which is no longer fun to play, but more frustrating to progress through.

Nightfall is a good game, but at times its infruriating because of its variations in difficulty.

We need less interupting, ressing and multiplying creatures, and more intelligent AI to battle against. Not just continuing to give them over-powered abilities.

Guild Wars is meant to apeal to a wide audience. An audience of casual and hardcore players. We have more then enough content for both, but the trend seems to be removing the casual play in favour of more hardcore. It alientates those of us who dont want to spend hours on end doing a quest or mission.

Some of us like popping onto the game for 30 minutes to have some quick fun, and then move on. We dont all want to spend our entire nights online.

For my taste,

Too hard:
DOA

About right:
Urgoz, The Deep, FoW, UW, Titan quests, Realm of torment, ToPK

Too easy:
Most everything else.

Sometimes I want to be able to disengage the brain and c-space to victory. But I wish 20% of the content were like that, instead of 80%.

I'm really getting my hopes up on this. They may very well just make it hard ass with level 28 monsters with full bars and cheap mechanics. It's already been stated that we can counter it, but with the same builds and professions. Like it's been stated: If the "difficulty" is to a point where it calls for specific classes and excluding others (assassin, rit, derv), I will most likely not be playing it.

I'm not so sure I appreciate your particular use of terminology there... or indeed some of the implications you're making.

I am one of the people who like to consider themselves "hardcore" in terms of time and effort put in. Even though I now have to work 9:30 to 5:30, I still play GW for 45 minutes before going to work in the morning, and around 5 hours once I get back home... I personally loathe the whole "casual gaming" mentality.... something brought on by S*ny, and for that I will never forgive them.


... And yet I am quite separate from those unrighteously elitist gimps who insist on every game being one man against the hoardes of hell. Some of us, no matter how much effort we put in and no matter how much we strive to excell... simply cannot pull it off and have no desire to anyway.
Not only that but some of us end up unlucky.
I chose to play Assassin from the start, expecting that it would be enough to give me a full gaming experience and make my time worthwhile... Instead I find that there is a lot that is off-limits to me because of my earlier choices.... and furthermore I doubt I would be able to get through those elite areas even with a more able class (and I really do mean more able)...

I put my life into games like Guild Wars... but more often than not I'm finding it inevitably being ruined by the mentality of tards who think entertainment value is somehow linked to how hard the monsters hit. Gaming should be about engaging the brain.... and not merely about brute force, itchy trigger-fingers and sheer luck.
Satisfaction comes from appreciation of the thought put into a game... of its originality... workability... its flow. It comes from things as simple as graphical appearance and music and can run through to things as complicated as the sophistication of the programming. It can even come from having spent so much time playing a game that it becomes inately familiar, and I begin noticing things I never would have seen otherwise (like the giant monster respawn points in Morrowind, and the bizarre Pokemon references) Satisfaction does NOT in my case come from beating down another menial death-machine after a two-week struggle... only to have to do it again immediately. Defeating a ridiculously tough enemy after a frustrating grind doesn't make me feel satisfied so much as "thank fvck thats over, and may I never have to do it again"!

But just because I think like this does not justify grouping people of my mindset with the likes of "casual gamers"... I AM a true gamer. I don't just pick it up on occasion, prat around for a few minutes and then go do something else. The time, effort and creativity that gets put into making a good game deserves respect and dedication in its play. It deserves to be taken seriously. Just because I don't have the reflexes of a viper, the eyes of a hawk and a thoroughly masochistic mind-set doesn't make me a "casual gamer".



Anyway.
Excuse my rant. I kinda lost it then for a moment.

As I was saying before.... scrap the elite areas... all of 'em.... or make them easier. Yes... even the Underworld. If I'm going to pay a platinum to get into a place, I expect to be able to get my money's worth from it and not just get slaughtered by repetitive enemies. Let the challenge-tards go fight in PvP or something.

RoT doesn't require a specific build... it just requires you to play smart, have a build that doesn't suck (which doesn't mean "specific"!) and if you want to make it easier, bring counters for certain areas. For example, Domain of Fear is stuffed with lvl 28 water eles that deep freeze you for ~150 and then keep nuking you while you're snared, so I put 3 copies of Cry of Frustration into my build (in addition to a few interrupts I already had) and so much for those snares. The rest of the build is wide-open...

Shiro only requires one specific skill to beat him: Wild Blow (or wild strike, or wild throw) and even without it he's not impossible... just significantly harder.

So, you want a mental challenge, but you look up the answer on wiki before trying the mission?

Yeah, the problem's with GW here!


Anyhow, I like my missions to be challenging. They shouldn't all be on the level of DoA, of course, but Risau Palace, Gate of Madness and the like are fun for me. There's not a storyline mission in the whole GW universe that can't be henched. That probably shouldn't be the case.

I like the mix as it is now. Sometimes I like the mindless missions that I can do in my sleep (vegetable or heavy drinking times) and other times I like the challenge where I have to do the mission a few times and fail at different points to learn the best way to do each part of the mission.

The toughest part of PvE for me is finding a good group not the mission itself. There is always a way to beat a mission if everyone on the team does their part...unfortunately it doesn't typically work out that way! That's why I really appreciate the heroes in Nightfall to cut down on my reliance of the 'team du jour' where I didn't know if I'ld be getting the "tank-kamikaze", "uber-nuker can kill anything", "I've got to go eat dinner (10 minutes into mission)", two or more "I've done this mission 100 times so listen to what I say" or "oh I didn't tell you I wasn't a healer but a smiter" players. I REALLY REALLY appreciate and remember when I have a good team where everyone listens to each other and does a mission as a part of whole instead of trying to rush through it and getting killed for a stupid mistake. I've done gate of madness in Nightfall with two characters and with one I had to do the mission 10+ times because of crappy teams and the other character I did twice because I got on a solid team that took their time and did each step as a team.

So to answer your question in a different way....yes I would like the missions to be harder IF I could get better teams to play PvE. Having a regular team of people you play with in a guild or otherwise can make the missions easy.

Something in between the difficulty of the desolation and RoT. Enemies in Lvl26 mobs with lvl 28/29 bosses

I have been playing GW since the day of its release and i have to say I wish all of the games were on par with the difficulty of Tyrian missions, THK ROF and all those other areas were challenging, and fun. When I did THK with a guild group i felt like we bonded and were alittle closer for it. Ofc I also like that THK is accomplishable, and not pain in the butt to complete. I wish all missions towards end game were like that or sorrows furnace -cookie cutter builds

there shouldn't have elite mission. those mission really exclude many classes. and progress is so slow to a point that it really take up too much time that I often need heavy does of coffee toward the end of mission.
ton of lvl 28 to regular people is just a hopeless battle and it really get bore of doing it because there is only a few team build that work at the same pattern. I like the regular mission because it don't require very specific build and we can experience different way to pass the mission.

if they want to make elite mission I suggest that each time we enter the area there will be different type of mob build with ~lvl24~28 bosses like someone else said.
I really feel sick of those over-powered mob that really make the game a pain over joy.
IMO, even ROT is a bit too difficult for people to have fun (maybe it is why called ROT) mission in Tyria and Faction iare hard enough that people don't hate them so much and not willing to do it again. RoT is a pain (even harder then FoW)
the fun of mission should be that you can go into an area with different type of build and get out of it. area that only certain build will work will do nothing but ruin people's appetite and encourage racism/elitism/ class discrimination.

IMO, Prophesies has all the difficulty I need. Starts easy and builds up as you gain access to the needed skills to compete. In Factions, the repetiveness of the quests, covering the same area over and over, sent me back to Prophesies. I now have NF. I only got it for the heros for now. Maybe later I will go there.

The AI updates last fall, made areas that were difficult for me nearly impossible. Areas that you had to think your way thru became a slaughter house, that being me being slaughtered. I had to remove damage causing skills and add skills that slowed down the marathon runners, more AoE type skills for the large mobs all over me, and forget healing skills, ALWAYS interupted. Just die and ressuect and try again until dps too high to deal with, or I get too ticked to try anymore.

For me, leave the difficulty where it is. I don't want to spend 3 or 4 hours working an area that now takes me 1 or 2. (And please, don't rag on me about my skill bar again. I use what I have.)

You do realize, that it would make it PvP?
Do we want two PvP modes? No, course not.
Bring back, strong but stupid enemies with stupid builds. Bring back farmable monsters and running, those were the things I personally loved in Prophecies. Especially running, my favourite PvE thing.

Instead of discussing which skill level would fit most players, first realize that players of different skill level play this game, and they play for different reasons. Read up MTG's Timmy, Johnny, Spike and Vorthos if you didn't already. I think the keyword here is, interactive environment, the players get to choose the preferred difficulty before entering a new area, mission etc..
Making this discussion needless.

Agree?

I think adding monsters with full bars, a fair level and more intelligence would be much more fun than being able to kill a whole campaign full of enemies with the same build over and over again. Much more strategy would be involved, thus more fun. Somewhat like Baldur's Gate II, where it had fights that involved a deep level of strategy, and it ruled.