Which mission deserves the prize for the worst design?

Id have to say Unwakuing waters, you are basicly useless as a melle class. As a melle you cant target wannabee glint so the henchies attack other ennimies>other ennimies healers>each other>you>wannbee glint by which time wannabee glints megasuperimba lightning has owned them all (bunch up ftL). Ill proberly consider a run of it on my warrior since its so fking annoying >.< .

Another vote for Divinity Coast.

Some of the ones most mentioned here are actually some of my favorites (e.g. Vizunah Square, Moddock Crevice, etc.).

Here's my vote for the most poorly designed:

1. Nolani Academy. Having to Leeroy with Rurik is simply silly, especially if your character/group isn't designed to simply blow up the enemy. That and being able to bypass over half of the mission by simply pulling a lever - kind of bad design.

2. Abaddon's Mouth. This has to be the most painful of the bonuses, having to escort a dead chick (who goes at a snail's pace and gets lost) halfway across the map. You have no idea how many people drop from the mission when they realize how slow the bonus is.

3. Unwaking Waters. I agree that rendering melee classes almost completely useless for a good part of the mission is bad design. I got so frustrated, I packed nothing but Smiting Signets on my whammo just to prove a point.

4. Jokanar Diggings. Another silly bonus, where you have to try to stop an NPC you have no control over (i.e. Kormir) from attacking the ghosts to gain the bonus. I find myself simply running like hell through the bonus just to get Kormir to stop attacking the damb spirits, and that only works half of the time.

Cool, any tips? If it's just that I suck I retract my complaint.

You don't lose the bonus for Kormir attacking, just your own party members. I usually afk and let Kormir kill the things solo, actually, with all my heroes set to avoid combat.

oh god yes that cow was so slow whats worse you had to follow her to make sure nothing came around and butchered her. Although after five minutes you'd feel like butchering her. =P

Joknour Diggings would come to mind with that stupid bonus and why would kormir be killing sunspears dead or alive anyway?

Although I really like vizunah square which is mentioned in some above posts the worst mission which really in my opinion should belong really to gate of madness due to lack of originality. I mean come on shiro'ken, those portal wraiths and to top it off titans not to mention the margonites whos temple who it belongs to in the first place then you get shiro and the lich at the end;
I played the other two games to fight them and soundly kick their backsides why do I have to do it again? you may as well call that Imperial Precipice or Hells Sanctum.

I think you mean Varesh. Kormir is the one on your side :P.

I will say I hate Eternal Grove's design, as well. How come the Kurzicks are stuck with a slightly aggrevating mission and the Luxons get a lovely exploit to theirs?




(cwidt??)

Go the back way, and watch out for the groups that spawn when you kill the initial mobs. Deal with them carefully. When you talk to the NPC with the turtles, deal with the groups that spawn by planting your party and a smoke canister amid the baby turtles (deal with juggernauts quickly), and after that it's basically clear sailing...

That's awesome to know - I always assumed that I'd lose it with her Leeroying the stinking spirits.

I thought both Unwaking Waters were the same Do u mean Gyala (for the Luxons) and Eternal Grove (for the Kurzicks)?

Oops, thank you sir.

Jennur's Horde and Grand Court I think were bad designs. Grand Court had no place in PvE and was a dreadful speedbump in the game to many. Jennur's Horde was equally as obnoxious.

I agree. THK is just a drawn out snooze fest. No challenge and unesasarry time spent with no purpose. Worst mission IMO.

I agree in that being forced to take a certain hero for a mission was awkward and ruined the opportunity to have a full 8-man group of people. Very glad with GW:EN, you did the quest with the hero as a npc and then unlocked the hero for use.

Dzagnur Bastion and Grand Court where for me fairly easy to complete with masters maybe its because I had LB R2 by the time I got there. I had no idea what the title was for when i got R1 all I knew is I wanted R2....

But at this point I hate Jennur's Horde and Eternal Grove. I avoid those 2 missions like the plague.

THK I usually walk away and let the H/H and henchies handle it after you initially clear the keep from the stone summit.

Other than Tahanaki Temple is a bit annoying but doable.

Other than that I can't think of anything thats given me to much trouble.

Grande Courte and Viz Sqre.

Bad mechanics:

All realm of Torment, Arborstone, anything where the characters are artificially impeded by "environmental" effects while enemies are not. It feels phony, as though ANet couldn't come up with a real challenge, so they just crippled the PC's and hoped nobody caught on.


Bad Design:

1: "<NPC Name> must survive." Togo and Mhenlo are suicidal, no matter what anyone says. Forcing the players to guard a sporadic, unpredictable, and self-destructive AI character is just a silly idea. If the NPC's would stay even with flags, it wouldn't be so bad, but they don't let you pull, they tend to aggro everything in a 3-mile radius, and they WILL NOT RETREAT EVER. "MHENLO SMASH!"

2: "Your team + a random other team." Yeah. I play H+H to avoid other players. My last 2 tiems through Vizunah Square, I got live people on the other side, and both were actually good times (Togo stuck on the first one, we completed with master's on the second.) but in general, the bad experiences far outweigh the good ones.

Overall, I'm gonna say Eternal Grove is the worst mission out there. The forced split, the fragile NPC's, and the worthless backup NPC's. Arborstone for cheap mechanics, horrible AI, guard the NPC, and just generally being annoying to me.

Gyala is easy thanks to the "back door". Eternal Grove is just a huge pain in the *** to get masters if you dunno what you're doing. Hell even if you do know what you're doing, no guarantee one of those tree huggers won't croak from a stray turtle siege or if one of your lines breaks from the inflicted...

My nominations for the worst cooperative mission award, in no particular order:

Vizunah Square, Unwaking Waters
- Success depends too much on something you have no control over: the other team.
- Communication difficulties with the other team.
- NPC pathing and scripting issues at Vizunah Square.

Moddok Crevice
- Dunkoro's suggestions.

Tihark Orchard
- Silly bonus objective that has absolutely nothing to do with actual skill at the game.

Raisu Palace
- Brainless mission-critical NPC's.
- There's no way to tell how each ally aids the party during the mission without prior experience or consulting an external source, such as the Wiki.

Thunderhead Keep
- Takes too long; no real challenge unless the party sucks.

Riverside Province
- The bonus depends on your ability to damage something out of reach (and, usually, protected from projectile fire by crappy collision detection), which some professions cannot accomplish without weird builds. Not that this is really a problem with a diverse party, but what were the mappers thinking?

Ice Caves of Sorrow
- Bonus more or less impossible to complete without infused armor, which is not available at the time (unless you run to Mineral Springs or the next mission's outpost first).

Arborstone
- Annoying environmental effect.
- Depending on how you deal with the mobs at the end Danika may rush through the last groups without prior warning, likely getting herself killed and causing the mission to fail. Hasn't been fixed by now so it must be part of the mission's design.

Abaddon's Mouth
- Boring, bugged bonus: the ghost required for the bonus takes a very long detour to the bridge _above_ the gate she's found behind, suggesting one of her waypoints intended to be under the bridge ended up on top of it. Since this hasn't been fixed already I suppose it's just part of the design, and therefore earns this mission a nomination.

Dasha Vestibule
- Takes too long; too much backtracking.
- The boss at the end is too effective at destroying henchmen and heroes in their poor standard formation, usually causing a party wipe (or at least the death of Goren, and thus mission failure) on the first try. This wouldn't really be a problem if the rest of the mission wasn't so easy.

Yes it is one of the different bonuses that adds a nice break from the mundane into it. My vote goes for Iron Mines, because the bonus was just so very random, and really, the mission somewhat irrelevant to the story line. Yes yes, killing Markis wasn't THAT important. Getting infused was though.

This is the only one I disagree on, I actually quite like Tihark as a change of pace.

Curse this time gap.... I tried to time it accordingly.... see my post ABOVE vin's....

In my books, the worst designed mission is Tihark Orchard. If someone is slow at typing, then you can forget about the bonus. Every time my boyfriend go through that mission, I end up doing the mime for him because he can't type to save his soul...

The other one is D'Alessio Seaboard, before they changed it so that you can pickup an other urn if you drop it the first time. It used to be that if you picked it up and dropped it, you'll fail the bonus. Correct me if I'm wrong with this.

Hmm ive hero/henched that 5 times with all different characters, not that hard.

the great northern wall...........

QFT. I just got done failing Ice Caves of Sorrow for the upteenth time because Evennia wants to make friends with that giant group of Mursaat.

Jennur's Horde because it requires humans.

I just tried this a few minutes ago, and it is 100% incorrect.

If Kormir kills the Sunspear Ghosts, you lose the bonus.

Sunjiang District. It's terribly annoying trying to get into a group, and seeing a majority of people there ignore you, in favor of henching it.

My votes are:

Arborstone, not because its hard but because when the door collapses the stone pile only goes up to my waist. Why can't I climb over the rock pile? Are my legs broken or something?

Moddock crevice, because last time I did this mission our team followed all four suggestions then we got lost and accidently wandered into the big bug area and lost masters. Why should I loose masters after I already followed all four suggestions. >:|

Dunes of Despair... the masters for that is IMPOSSIBLE! How do you expect me to keep the freakin ghostly hero safe while going out to go beat up the generals?

q.q how do you do this!?

I usually bond him up with a monk or have a friend/guildy thats a monk wait by him.

Not really the thread for discussing this, but you could just have a Monk bond the ghostly hero, leave the monk somewhere out of enemy sight and run off to complete the bonus. None of the enemies can remove enchantments in Normal mode.

My least favorite is easily Moddok Crevice. Any rangers wanting to make money should sell their bodies there.

I quite like Jennur's Horde, if you run by the first few harbingers you can flag your heroes on the first carpet bridge, with one placed on each side slightly away from the bridge, and they can kill the 4-marg teams every two minutes while you pull all the other groups to them, including those on the stairs. Then you can just run back to either the beginning or the one harbinger you can kill without expanding the spawn, and kill the harbingers at the top of the stairs solo.

Crap, I muddled that description. I think it's described in a much better manner on the wiki.

Its all been mentioned.

1) Buggy NPCs that are mission/masters critical (Vizunah)
2) Artificially enforced need for specific skills (Wild Blow for Shiro)
3) Artificially enforced need for specific professions (Non-melee for Unwaking), 4) Dependence on the other party. (Vizunah, Unwaking)
5) Tedious instead of difficult. (Lots)
6) Ambiguous instructions. If you need to read the wiki, just to get a rough idea what is going on, then its kinda fail.
7) I generally dislike time-based bonus, which is pretty much all of factions.
8) Difficulty based on wrong timing. (Ice Cave bonus before Infusion, Grand Court bonus before LB gaze.)

All in all, I think its like this.
1) Many missions are retardly hard with only Henchmen.
2) A few missions/masters are stupidly hard with Henchmen and Heroes only.
3) All missions and masters are quite doable in Normal mode with 2 Humans + Heroes.
4) More humans may actually be regressive.

I think all basic Mission objectives in Prophesies and Factions should be able to be met by 1 human of any profession + henchmen. The same with Nightfall with H&H. This might mean some basic Mission objectives have to be made easier.

But I also don't mind that some Masters are made more difficult. Or various tiers of difficulty. As it stands, Elite is not worth anything cos Masters are easy to do. That will make Protector valuable too.

More difficult =/= more tedious.

QFT. This only used to be hard because the pugs were so bad.
Now it's so easy that it's not even funny.

What? Then they changed it. I've gotten the bonus on that mission many times by letting her kill them. If they changed it, they should definitely change it back.

Ruins of Surmia: Its an easy mission but there are so many things that can go wrong. Someone will trigger Rurik before everyone spawns and he dies. Rurik gets stuck. Someone Leeroys the Charr for the bonus. The Charr for the bonus get stuck(that happened to me before). Some jerk goes along for the monument and maps out. Plus the mission is just too danged long.

Vizunah Square: The first two times you fight the Afflicted its ok but the 3rd time they pop up too fast and from too many places. It would be better to make them spawn a little slower so people can actually recover from the explosions. Heroes are great healers but Dunk just can't keep up. I need to test Light of Deliverance in this mission. Mass heals=more win.

Tahnnakai Temple: Just because of the blatant retardery of pugs. It seems like no one knows how to pull the Temple Guadians w/o pulling the Afflicted. Plus people don't seem to keep track of Mhenlo and Togo's HP. I MM that mission and end up using my self-heals to heal them more than myself, as the healer NPC's are overtaxed trying to correct the pugs noobery.

Every. single. timed. one.

yes.