GWEN Preveiw Feedback

Not finding a consolidated feedback thread anywhere, I've decided to start one.

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My opinions:

First, let me begin by saying that overall, I was very pleased with the preview event. Now, I am going to proceed to "focus on the negative." I'm not going to do this because I think there was a lot of negative aspects to the preview event, or because I think negative aspects predominated. I do not think either of those things. (See the above bolded sentence.) Rather, I'm going to "focus on the negative" because that's where the problems are, and that's where improvements can be made. Negative feedback, while not always pleasant, is useful feedback.
Storage Crisis. We were already really hurting for storage going in. There's no new storage, but it looks like every character is now going to have to be hauling around 2 record books, a pair of brass knuckles, a bunch of polymock pieces, and a bunch of customized minipets. Ouch. That's no good.
My proposed solution: I hear that polymock is going to have essentially it's own bag for pieces. If so, that's one problem solved. A separate bag for just the record books would also be a good idea. As for the minipets, for the love of Pete, just make them customized to the account instead of to the character so that people don't have to buy duplicates. Hall of Monuments Very Underwhelming. I pretty much agree with everything posted here. In particular, the customization of minipets to a particular character instead of to the account is a big problem. Other than that, I am just underwhelmed with the lack of character-specificity and the bizarre focus on high-end PvP in a PvE monument. Solo Quests/Bison Tournament Too Hard. Now, before someone starts mocking me for being a "total noob," I do not mean this in the subjective sense that "it's too hard for me." (To the contrary, I personally have had little trouble with them because I'm in a position to adapt farming builds for which I already have the skills and the gear.) I do mean "too hard" in the objective sense that "it's to hard for the average player." The people beating these quests tend to have access to all 3 campaign's worth of skills, special gear (20% enchant mod, 55 armor set, crippling or poisoning bowstring, etc.), ample gold to buy the foregoing if they don't already have what they need, and access to the collective wisdom (or lack thereof) on the forums and the wiki. (I know I used all of those things (if you count when I originally learned about 55 builds and earth tanks as using the forums) to beat those quests.) The average player has none of the above. Sure, everyone who's read the thread here knows that you can buy your way through these quests for 7k, a trip to the Sunspear Great Hall, and a trip to Tennakai Temple. But what is that to the majority who don't visit the forums, may not own both Factions and Nightfall, and can't exactly spare 7k per character to move through the quests?
My proposed solution: Nerf the quests with functional rewards (such as skills or hero unlocks) down to the "lowest common denominator level." Leave the repeatable tournament quest -- and other vanity reward quests -- "as is" for those of us who want a challenge. Monster Build Quality Improvement Is Outpacing Hench/Hero AI Quality. The monster builds are really quite improved from the previous chapters. Not only are the monsters dual-profession, but they've been given some downright clever team builds, at least by monster standards. A few examples: (1) The mangrador pack fevered dreams paired with condition spam and toxicity. (2) Elementals and ice imps snare so that maelstrom and djinn can't be escaped. (3) Chromatic drakes snare so that fire AoE can't be escaped. (4) Jotun combine healer shutdown, mark of pain, and really big clubs. I consider all of these to be good improvements -- after all, how long have we been asking for "smarter monsters"? The big problems is that, in the face of these improved monsters, the hero/hench AI is just as dumb as ever. In this new light, two of the weaknesses in the hero/hench AI really stick out like sore thumbs: (1) the heroes/hench still bunch up like idiots and make themselves sitting ducks for these mobs' AoE effects, and (2) the heroes/hench have no sense of priority for interrupting or hex removal.
Why #1 is a problem should be obvious. In case why #2 is a problem isn't obvious, here's an example: After my first painful encounter with the mangrador, I got to the Eye and stuck Cure Hex (great skill btw) on my monk. I just made sure to remove Fevered Dreams immediately and the mangrador went down easily. Later, for my other characters, when I left the healing to Mhenlo and Lina, sometimes Fevered Dreams would get removed and the mangrador would go down easily, but sometimes it wouldn't and I'd suddenly find every member of my party with 10 degen and a deep wound. Heroes/hench exist so that you don't "have" to bring human players. But when the difference between a human player and a hench is a fair risk of 10 degen and a deep wound on your entire party, it gets harder to say that you don't "need" a human monk because heroes/hench are available. If the late-game monsters are as much nastier than these mangrador as the torment monsters were to Nightfall's mangrador, the hero/hench inability to remove key hexes/interrupt key skills/etc. may well leave them totally useless.
My proposed solutions to problem (1), "bunching up like idiots":The "right" solution is to add an anti-bunching routine to the non-melee AI. Just like a human, they should "know" the largest AoE skill on a given mob's skillbars by looking at the mob, and, during combat, the non-melee heroes/hench should fan out so that no two of them are within that range (battlefield space permitting). (ie if the largest AoE skill the monsters have strikes adjacent, then the non-melee heroes/hench spread out far enough that no two are adjacent; if the largest skill is nearby range, they spread so that no two are nearby.) Understanding that the "right" solution is programming-intensive, the "easy" solution is to stick a "scatter" toggle on the hero/hench control radar's-butt-thingy that causes the non-melee heroes/hench to maintain non-adjacent positions during combat when it is "on." They will behave as they do now when it's "off." In any event, all the henchmen need to learn to step out of meteor shower, maelstrom, and chaos storm ASAP. My proposed solution to problem (2), "lack of priorities":Again, the "right" solution is an AI overhaul to the hero hench AI. First, there's a number of things that the AI should be able to "know":

Like any player who can count, the AI ought to be able to "know" how many monsters of which type are in a mob. Like any player who's faced a given mob before, the AI ought to be able to "know" which skills the monsters have and what their effective recharges are (after factoring in faster-recharge skills, boss bonuses, hard mode bonuses, etc). Like any player with good observation skills and teammates on vent, the AI ought to be able to "know" which foes are using which skills and which allies are afflicted with which hexes/conditions. Finally, like any player on an organized team, the AI ought to be able to "know" how many interrupts/hex removers/condition removers the team has and what their effective recharges are. Building on that "knowledge" it shouldn't be too hard to write an algorithm to build priority lists for interruption/removal. Things on the lists get interrupted/removed; things that aren't on the lists get ignored until they make the list in a future iteration. Just make sure to rebuild the lists every time something dies/spawns/gets rezzed. The problem of assigning a gamewide priority weight to every skill can be overcome by using local weight sets stored in the mob data (ie Fevered Dreams has maximum priority for interruption/removal when fighting a GWEN mangrador mob, but low priority when fighting a prophecies darkfang dryder mob). The only "hard" part of this problem is codifying when to use dual-aspect skills in non-priority ways (ie when is it OK to use savage shot against a non-priority spell just for the bonus damage? When is it OK to use cure hex on a non-priority hex just to get the heal?).
(Yes, I am aware that I'm totally dreaming to think that a-net might even consider investing the programmer hours to make this sort of AI improvement to a game now entering its last installment. My best hope is that a-net realizes that this sort of improvement to the AI is going to be needed at some point to take the fantasy MMO to the next level, and implementing it in GW1 might be a good way to thoroughly explore and test the algorithms for GW2.) I cannot think of an "easy" way to "fake" good priority decisions for the heroes/hench. I'm afraid this one is all-or-nothing. One solution to both problems that I don't much care for: Nerf the monsters. If you don't want to put in the time and effort to make the heroes/hench stop clumping up like idiots and start prioritizing their interrupts and hex/condition removals, you can always nerf the monsters so that the consequences of the hench screwing those things up aren't very severe. I don't much care for that possibility. I think it would be a crying shame to lose "smart" mobs now that we finally have them. And I think it would push the game towards C-space easiness. But it would work. Here's your lazy man's answer. Useless New Skills. A bunch of the new skills suck pretty hard. Here's three that both me because they are so close to not sucking, and yet they really suck:Glyph of Immolation. Only burns the targeted foe, and not any of the others you hit. Why would anyone ever use this instead of Mark of Rodgort? It's just inferior. Spotless Mind. Why, oh why, can't it remove the first hex when cast? Rarely. if ever, is a hex going to be severe enough to remove (instead of just leaving it as fodder for dwayna's kiss) yet not severe enough to remove right now. The 5 sec delay on the first removal just sinks this skill. And the possibility to remove an extra 1, or 2, or even 10 hexes later on does not buy this skill's way out of the doghouse. Spotless soul. Same deal.
In conclusion, let me return to where I started: I was really pleased with the preview. Overall GWEN is looking very good. All of the above is meant purely as (lengthy) constructive criticism.

Overall I was impressed with it. You already pointed out pretty much all the problems I saw with it (Buggy AI, etc). The HoM was for me, by far the LEAST impressive (and downright boring/underwhelming) part of it. I honestly can't see what all the hype was about. :/

Dungeans are really fun, I found myself going back to do Frostmaw several times just for the heck of it. Quests are nice, with (finally) worthwhile rewards. Minigames and solo quests are fun, but not very well-balanced at the moment (certain classes have a much easier time than others...for example Rt or /Rt).

But yeah, overall...impressive. And I'm looking forward to the 31st.

If HoM was what i thought i'd of give GW:EN a 10/10 maybe higher . .

But with it being PvP, and i couldn't find any skins the weapon monument will take from the golds i found, AND that heroes have to have custom armour
The heroes one i can understand but please add a way to get new armour for all heroes in GW:EN, i hated that PacMan thing in NF and the other two missions never give me armors

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