Your thoughts on the Titan Hard Mode quests

What jeydra said.

I would also like to point out that IMO the main threat of those titans isn't the skill "Smash of the Titans" and their huge damage in general. Groups only tend to have 1 or 2 of these hard hitting guys and the skill can easily be negated/countered by prots, spirits, minions or interrupts. Player parties with good positioning should have even less problems with it.

The main threat lies in the builds of these guys. The level 40 Titan's Malice and Titan's Heart have builds which we would consider meta or close to meta builds. Panic and Healing Burst are probably the best skills in their respective attribute lines and the rest of their skills are also meta material, look em up. The Dark Titan and Icy Brute also have excellent builds. Rotting Titans are Discord Resto's and the Water and Earth Born titans also have a great collection of skills. In short, you're up against a whole army of meta builds with top notch elites as Panic, Healing Burst and Spiteful Spirit.

Since we have the disadvantage of being outnumbered most of the times, resorting to meta Spirit and Minion builds is a logical step to relieve pressure.
Simply put, below-par builds just aren't going to cut it against these guys. Fights against titans tend to last above average so good healing, energy management and damage prevention is essential.

Now we humans still have the advantage of course, we can exploit the (hero) AI because we know how it works, we have PvE skills, superior positioning and cons.

The overal conclusion: The missions are doable with good builds and good play, even easier with meta ones but they are not required. When playing with heroes you probably have a harder time because of Panic, but it's still very doable especially with meta builds.
Feel free to go up against these guys with every build you want, but don't wine because your fail with bad builds. It are challenging quests and using good/meta builds is the most logical thing to do.
Don't be stupid and combat meta stuff with meta stuff.

One more time: I'm not complaining that bad builds can't do it. I'm complaining that anything outside a very small set of builds can't do it. Half the classes in GW are worthless or next to worthless in these quests either because every worthwhile thing they bring to the table is totally countered or they use up a party space without bringing enough mitigation. Quests should not be designed so that entire classes are deadweight.

The problem is first and foremost that guild wars is horribly imbalanced and no attempt has been made to correct this. But for these quests specifically, the problem is made much worse because the areas are designed to only cater to imbalanced builds. The ridiculous armor levels alone make my head spin. I almost half expected enemies with Banish Enchantments to make an appearance at some point.

It feels like some lazy intern got put in charge and they took everything Anet did with WiK, decided "RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GO that", then phoned it in the night before the update.

It's called a nerf bat and it needs to crack heads. Working only one side of the equation (the "E" in PvE) doesn't address one addressable source of the problem: P

They are neither too easy, nor too difficult: they are the same as most harder HM content. If you go with the handful of wtfpwn skills that pve has, you win. Easily. In fact, they could raise the monster lvl from 42 to 84 and it wouldn't change a thing, you could still beat it with the usual OP crap and AI abuse. That IS the problem.

Ah hah, but then you run into alienating a significant portion of the player base. See, you aren't the only person, and you aren't the only one with opinions. Just look at how many people complain about shadow form being nerfed, or other skills. It happens. Not everyone can be happy, but they are, for all intents and purposes, attempting to cater to the players that prefer easier content, while simultaneously providing harder content for others to play. It's a rather fine balance you don't seem to be aware of. Game balance is delicate, and player's opinions are significant - oftentimes, slight changes can set off reactions unforeseen among a player base.

What I'd like to see is a suggestion I saw - have quests that use skills from Codex. Only those skills allowed - including PvE skills (could have 3 randomly chosen PvE skills or etc). There's an interesting sort of mix-up. But it'd probably be hated and disliked by a fair portion of the player base, as it'd be actually difficult. And as said, game balance is delicate - you have to keep content hard, refreshing, and as less likely to become stale as possible, while still trying to keep it open to a lot of players to actually be able to complete - without affecting the other areas of content, too.

In the 8 man quest, only the Ranger is of really limited worth (nothing new there).
In the 6 man quests I'd be much more reluctant to take a Paragon.
The problem only really arises in the 4 man quests where you need to really consider the strengths and weakness of what you bring.

The only quest I didn't have done when I saw your post was The Titan Quest ...



Mission kinda sucked because of the 4-man restriction (ew, so much less flexibility) as well as the Tar around the bosses (makes it hard to pull). But whatever, it's doable. In the 8-man missions, you have a lot more leeway and I am certain you can run every non-melee profession. Actually I believe you can run every profession, you're just less effective etc.

One can argue that spirits are overpowered in PvE, and that would be spot on. But take away spirits and doing this mission really will be impossible (or close to it, at least) with heroes. Not only that, such a change will significantly alter the power balance of PvE as a whole. A lot of players will be affected and a lot will complain. Is it for the better if spirits are nerfed? I have no opinion. Just be aware of the consequences of what you wish for.

I'm a bit tired of repeating myself, but once again: this is nothing new.
Meta builds have been around for ages and each class has a proper build they can run in this mission. The game balance simply doesn't favor certain classes true, but this has absolutely nothing to do with these quests *sigh*
These are some of the hardest quests so it's only logical to use meta builds, what else did you expect, that you can beat these quests with every build?
Wouldn't be much of a challenge then would it. You get the picture?

Pretty sure that spirits/minions are implicitly out of the question too, considering they are if anything more imba than the prots already mentioned. Try it again with a physical party.

lolno, it has a lot to do with these quests. WiK is proof that you can make hard mobs without screwing over certain classes unnecessarily. The enemies here aren't just strong, they are specifically countering everything but mesmers/spirits/minions/SY to the point where everything else can't be run.

It is not logical that a quest is specifically designed for only 2 or 3 classes in the game.

Don't forget that WiK is actually easy. Sure it's harder than the average VQ, but it's still c-spaceable material. The Titan missions are not. Therefore we can agree that the Titan missions are harder, no? So even though certain builds and professions are heavily disadvantaged, the missions have achieved their purpose. Like I said, can you design a mission that's hard but not impossible? Even after nerfs to spirits / minions, if you so desire?

The Titan missions aren't nothing but Mesmers / spirits / minions either btw, I bet I could've done the 8-man missions with physicals. 4-man, no. 8-man, yes.

1. That's impressive. I didn't think it could be done.

2. My original statement still stands, just amended to include spirits. You as much as say so yourself.

3. I still want to these these done with something other than a casterway.

4. I entirely agree with Kunder's last post.

WiK HM is only marginally easier than the Titan Quests unless you run builds that the enemies in TQs are designed to hard counter. Original (pre-nerf) BFLA HM was harder than any TQ and it was harder in a good, non-cheap way.

This I would like to see.

WiK HM is easy c-space material with standard builds. I'm serious. It's not difficult at all.

I can't repeat the original 8-man missions, but I don't see what's so difficult about simply using something like MM + SoS + SoGM + 2x ED + N/Rt Resto + 1 Paragon + player GDW. How hard can it be? At most it'll just be careful pulling, nothing more.

That was also one of the easiest quests. I also would like to see how long it took you having to place down your spirit wall each time and waiting for minions to get in range.

But again, the Titan Source, from my experience, was the easiest quest. The Charr, while troublessome when their group-setup is right, don't pose much of a problem 95% of the time because, again, AI is so shit and so easily abusable.

As long as you take it slow (With your build that shouldn't be a problem) and abuse the flaws of enemy AI, you could beat TTS with relatively crap bars. One thing I have actually found is that the AI is change for the worse: You can pull charr to a certain limit (which is really close to where they are) and if you take 1 step beyond that, they immediatly turn around, even if you're at 1 HP.

Essentially, you could run a spike build (Like yours) and just lure every charr group to the edge of their aggro and just spike them out one by one, taking few to no damage whatsoever. This is true for every group up untill the Titan Boss group, but once you kill the Charr Shaman, they haven't got a dedicated healer, so you can lure them to the edge of their aggro, spike one out, and the new Titans that spawn will stay around that area, whereas the rest of the group will just run back to their spawn.

In other words:

These Titan quests (all of them) aren't hard. You gotta know what to abuse and how. You don't have to be skilled (You call me bad, yet I steamrolled through all these quests with no effort, aside from TLDD and that was solely cuz Rurik's group is so terribly scaled), you don't need to have an extensive understanding of GW and it's mechanics, you simply do not have to be good at GW to beat these quests.

You need to know what builds to run and how to abuse shitty AI. All the people who claim these quests were "hard" (read: challenging, bringing something new to GW) simply don't know what builds are effective nor how to abuse obvious AI flaws.

If you run paragon and ranger heroes without any form of gimmick-abuse, and you just run into every group hoping to just steamroll them, you're obviously going to wipe. That, again, does not make these quests hard, it means you haven't mastered some of GW's most basic "mechanics" yet. (AI abuse and gimmick builds)

Do you honestly not realize how enormously retarded that is? If the developers seriously think that is how the game is meant to be played then I will be at Bellevue Washington next week to go on a shooting spree. Grats, you have exploited the same bug that everyone has known out since their first pre searing character. I suppose lvl 200 enemies would still be balanced as long as their AI let you shit on them through exploits like that.

Poorly designed AI does not excuse poorly designed encounters.

I think the biggest problem with ArenaNet's design team is they sometimes throw missions at you that in theory sound "cool", that they call "challenging", but they do not thoroughly plan out the tactics and strategies needed to actually beat the quests, nor' balance around any ideas of that sort.

The War in Kryta's "Battle for Lion's Arch" is a prime example to this sort of lacking of polished design, where it seems absolutely no effort was put into the designs of mobs, but rather how "cool" they seemed. Supposedly you are meant to move behind NPCs as the enemies are "pushing you back", but that was only in theory and did not work at all ingame. Furthermore, what was the "superbuff" you got at only the very end of the mission? Infusion? You've got to be kidding me! If you weren't already infused, you would be dead! What a difference that makes, right? Then don't get me started how they threw Spectral Agony enemies at you without a means of Infusal for those that haven't played through Prophecies yet.

ArenaNet must think more thoroughly what they actually intend players to do in order to win, and not just rushing it to the deadline simply because the Test Krewe was able to clear it a few times.

Just because you can beat it, doesn't necessarily mean the design is good. As a GW player, I will say that if this mentality continues in GW2, I will be very disappointed.

There is a big line between challenge, and unfair frustration.

I do think the old "eles do 400 damage unless you prot spirit/shelter/SY" is getting pretty old. If these skills aren't going to be adjusted then "difficult" AI needs to work around them rather than playing into them. A large number of small damage packets for instance, or of the unpreventable kind akin to dhuum skeletons. BFLA was closer to this with its sheer number of foes and a lot of them with DoTs.

A larger number of smaller packets simply moves the emphasis to different Prots (Spirit Bond and SoA), although I would consider this an improvement due to the nature of those skills.
Damage that ignores all forms of protection is absurd though; the Skeletons of Dhuum are most inelegant solutions (and don't really solve anything).

I think the problem with high level elementalists such as those in these quests are the damage formulas of GW themselves:

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Damage_calculation

It allows damage to be multiplied too high.

Unfortunately, there are too many balance risks in changing the formula.

These quests are beatable but they take an annoyingly long time.

Some advice:

- Bring Verata's gaze (or replace MM with another rit)
- Don't rely on enchantments
- Bring lots of anti-hexes
- Bring lots of anti-enchantments

These are not typical of meta builds. There are lots of anti-physical hexes from the titans.

What he said is not retarded, it is just slow. Did you notice that if you pull mobs into a spirit forest your team takes no damage behind the spirits? Now tell me is that retarded too? What about nuking mobs behind a tank?

I don't want to send you to Washington but games usually let you play through content no matter what. Sometimes it is a push of a button (change difficulty from hard to easy) sometimes it is (cheap or not) tactics.

At lvl 42 you must abuse the AI or the OP skills, it is up to you which one you can stomach.

This is simply not true, WiK is easy compared to the titan mobs, just look at their skills and levels.
Most of WiK was done in 6-man parties anyway, the Titan quests, except the last one can be done in 8 man parties and give you a much harder time, including the 7 hero update!
I remember taking henchman along during WiK lol.
FYI I farmed BFLA multiple times pre nerf with the help of only one extremely handy skill: Panic.

Can you please explain to me how the Titan Quests are supposedly designed for only 2 to 3 classes? Because that's simply not true. How did WiK not screw professions over and the Titan Quests do? People ran Panic, Spirits and Minions in WiK as well. Actually if you look at it that way, WiK screwed other classes more because of the small party sizes.

As Jeydra said, I see no reason why these quests couldn't be completed by a physical orientated party. Mesmers and Rits are the best classes/heroes yes, and they make these quests much more easier, but other classes can do it as well. Admittedly less effective, but that's not the point. Falsely thinking that they can't is a sign of bad GW knowledge. It's kind of funny that you are the ones which are underestimating and excluding/discriminating classes right now and not the developers.

"Fine balance"? Over the years we've been served one dessert after another. We had to eat what we caught in the old days when just exploring areas was dangerous. Anet giveth and Anet can taketh away.

Codex solution misses the greater point these quests prove about PvE as a whole; I couldn't care less about them specifically.

Drok's and Titan Source were easy enough because I could go at my own pace.
Had some trouble with NK, Denravi, and Last Day, though. Had to tweak my hero builds a bit.

After wiping a couple of times on each one, i managed to get them all on my War. Here is some feedback:

Protect Droknar's:
- The Titans hearts are a pain to deal with when you get 3+. You NEED enchant stripping or you might as well be wasting your time. I had to change my build around adding dissenchantment on my ST rit and 2x shatter enchantment on my mesmers. Also consider bringing mirror of dissenchantment.
- You need good backline for this, especially when 7H, i found i needed my good old ER/prot ST defensive AND my UA monk to deal with some situations.
- Corner pulling flagging can help quickly dispatch mobs...IF DONE RIGHT. A halfass cornerstone will get your tank dead followed by the rest of the group
- The main problems with this particular quest were overaggro issues and aberrant patrol paths for mobs. Sometimes i got agro in the most wierd places.
- Difficulty 8/10

Denravi:

- Easy. Bring lots of prot enchantment. All the titans here either do elemental dmg or physical, but it can be mitigated through armor and none of them have enchant stripping. If you don't have a ER/Prot with ya after failing a few times you are simply bad at the game.
- The shining blade also helps you quite a bit with your killing.
- Save yourselves helps tremendously over here. A smiter monk can capitalize on the condition/hex spam on melee character, BRING ONE!

North Kryta:
- Can be 8 manned if going from temple of the ages, nuff said.
- 3/10 difficulty

Last day dawns:
- Let me say that this quest is retarded from the way its set up, to the allies' AI, to the scripting, and finally to the shit thats thrown at ya.
- Even before you even approach the king he rushes into a char + titan group. This leads to 2-3 NPCs dying as well as a party wipe in 70% of the cases.
- This is also based on luck. 2 flame keepers on initial group the king agroes
- 15/10 difficulty because of the random bullshit elements in there. needs a redisign

Titan source:
- Can be 6 manned. Easy. You take your own time getting there

I have a strong feeling we are suppose to use cons for these. But I have never used my cons for so long.

I struggled through without, but I would not blame anyone even the slightest bit for pulling out cons on these.

Just tried out DDF with my warrior, the melee hate is very annoying, without a dedicated hex remover, playing a melee is simply out of the question.

Definitely not impossible, just annoying.

Just did defend droknars forge. Wow what a PITA that was...

Guess I had about 5 party wipes all up, went through a few summoning stones....pretty much it. You just have to be really careful and take down the mesmer and monk titans ASAP.

Yeah LDD HM is almost impossible. How does one do it with only 4 in the party?

King Leeroy always die before I get to them.

This quest is certainly boring.

Burning a secondary on fall back can save you many reloads vs. bad spawns. Also be sure to pull/kill that charr group after the bend/before waking the king up.

One thing to keep in mind re: people's different experiences, the missions are generally a lot more hellish on frontliners, yes you deal more damage and can explode AoE sometimes, but you can't hide yourself behind a minion/spirit wall and therefore need actual prots/heals. Any lapse of shelter or prot spirit is instant death when near 40 eles are around. Flagging heroes to the back of you is also a more challenging experience when you can hardly see them.

Helps to bring a mesmer hero and lock it on to the annoying casters. As for the first charr mob; it's only really strong enough to kill the Kings guards and since they're completely useless it's not that big of a deal if they die.

If the group consists out of 2 rits (Caretakers + ancester's rage) and a fire ele or ranger, it can happen the king dies before you even get to him.

Ancestor's Rage does about 25-30% damage to the guards, and slightly less to the king (10-15% ish). Depending on the charr AI (which also seems to vary from different attempts), they can get up to 2 rounds of A-rage off (So 4 in total) before you can even reach them. (Even with fallback, you arrive 2-3 seconds after the second Arage hits)

If the Charr Ranger or Ele focusses on the king, which doesn't happen most of the time, the king can, in fact, die before you can even reach him. Maybe with Shelter/Union you could keep him alive, but against such a strong charr-setup it's a lost cause anyways. The Priest also doesn't prioritize the King over his guards, and as such will often waste heals/prots on the guards who die anyways, resulting in the King dying aswell.

I had troubles beating TLDD untill I stopped being so stubborn and just modded my bars. With the right build wars (even as a frontline -how I did it), this quest becomes a breeze. You obviously will need a "good" spawn.

So this quest can only be beaten through the "exploit" of being able to rezone a million times untill you get a decent spawn. I don't think anyone has posted a screenshot yet of beating this quest with the absolute worst spawn and worst AI. (Where they nuke the King down in about 8 seconds, the time it takes for the second Arage to hit)

For The last day dawns: on the wiki of the original quest, in the discussion section, you can see a map with the explanation of how it's possible to kill most of the titan groups without activating the king, allowing you to pre-complete the quest, essentially.

Yes the AI sucks, I saw the Monk literally standing there wanding the Titan while being beaten to death.

You can always start from Yak's... Hell, even ToA if you have a lot of spare time

Here is how i did LDD on my war. Keep in mind strat might change for a non melee but the basics are the same.

Makeup:

ER/Prot ele with SoH and Judges insight.
SoS/resto rit with splinter weapon
UA Monk.

The reason i am going with this much protection is that titan smash removes all prots, so you need the hand UA monk for the powerful group heals and the spike healing. Also the instant rez is nice

SoS/resto does healing and dmg

ER prot is there to prevent 80% of dmg as well as provide SoH and JI which are stripped if you get hit with titan smash. However they do good untill they are removed.

Let me just say that it took me over 8 tries to get this time, mainly due to changing makeup and until i got lucky with the char spawns. The problem is that the king runs off as soon as you get within his radar range and they are RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GOing faster than you are. So you can't even reach them till you engaged.

2 problems:
- getting 2 flamekeeper chars on the initial group that agroes the king --> death in 4 sec, nothing you can do. If they survive the SF spam, meteor will decimate them.
- Agro from the titan group which is nearby and occurs 4-5 sec after king engages with the initial char group

Solutions:
- Reset until you don't get 2 flamekeepers. Ideally you should have rangers and avengers but 1 flamekeeper is also manageble, just interrupt his meteor shower.
- Let the RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GOing helper NPCs die. if you bring sufficient healing it doesn't matter if the priest and/or guards die. If you rush in to try to save as many you risk agroing the titan group. So what you do is stand back and pick the char from range. Notice the titan group will agro eventually, but this still buys you a few more valuable seconds to have a better starting position and/or preprot shit
- Use a summoning stone for this part if it helps ya. It most likely will make no difference but based on chaotic nature of this game, it might give you a few sec.
- ALWAYS kill char first. A titan beating on 1 target is manageable because even if he gets to titan smash, a the ER/protter will reprot the moment enchants are down. However the other char deal close to the titans DEEps and need to be taken care of first
- Be sure you have "rebel yell" on and use vanguard skills, they work wonders vs char.

For LDD do not waste your time starting from Yaks or ToA, it takes over 1 hour to go back to frontier gate and it does not guarantee success. If you get 2 flamekeepers in the char group which is about to engage the king the whole group might die in a matter of seconds.

Lots of shit is bound to happen in that area before the king which might delay you.

I guess if you REALLY want to beat the quest start from ToA, it will guarantee success but Yaks is a waste.

I have no honest idea how you guys had this much trouble with LDD. It could be that I got a lucky spawn on my first try, but in the worst-case scenario I don't see why I can't just slot in a copy of Fall Back and get to the King even faster (and he was never close to dying in my run). Even worse case scenario I don't see why I can't just slot in a copy of Infuse Health to go along with Fall Back. The King has Defy Pain, he should not die.

The other quests can all be done 4-man or 6-man without pulling off any "start from Yak's" or "start from ToA" shenanigans, too.

This statement is like saying "I don't think anyone has posted a screenshot of beating the original LDD with pre-buff Life Transfer". The screenshot hasn't been taken because nobody thought it was necessary to take one. If the quest weren't one-time only, I don't see why I wouldn't be able to get such a screenshot.