Feedback by Condemned

Background: We completely dominated Guild Wars 2. We achieved a 30-0 record in WvW wins that has been unsurpassed to this day. After accomplishing what we had set out to do in Guild Wars 2, we chose to leave the game with our fond memories intact.

We are currently evaluating several upcoming games, one of which will ultimately serve as the continuation of our guild's proud history. We are thankful to Carbine for giving us the opportunity to provide early feedback.

Ruins of Kel Voreth- Dungeon Evaluation

Group composition:

Nrv - Warrior Tank

Noxxer - Esper Healer

Zeus - Spellslinger Hybrid

Aegrum - Spellslinger DPS

Nami - Esper DPS

Bosses:

Grond the Corpsemaker - We loved this fight. Overall, the mechanics felt like a breath of fresh air and a step in the right direction for dungeons. Considering that this was a level 20 dungeon the mechanics were rather in depth and fun to learn. The fact that you could use the traps to CC the trash waves before the boss was a fantastic touch and we loved that using the traps was the best way to deal with the tick spawns on the boss. However, it felt that some of the damage was lackluster and needed to be less forgiving for messing up, the trash felt weak as well but I'll cover that in another section. We may have ran into a few traps, telegraphs, or the bosses cleave a few times just to see how hard the mechanics hit for and none of them felt as if they could kill you unless you took more than a few of them. We all agreed that it felt undertuned but the mechanics made it fun.

Slavemaster Drokk - We ran into the same issue on Drokk as we did on Grond, except some of the mechanics did not appear to be working properly. For instance, during the phase when he spawned robots and they focused onto a player, none of the robots moved and we were able to AoE them down right in the doorway. The next part of that phase he spawns the bomb bots (not sure what their names were) that spread out across the room and covered the entire area with a telegraph, but when they finally exploded we didn't even lose our shields. Perhaps if the robot phase as fixed and the whole fight was tuned up slightly, this fight could be another great one.

Forgemaster Trogum - We again loved the concept of the mechanics, it has the chance to be an epic boss fight, however, once again we believe that the tuning was off. During the first phase we noticed that when he would focus on a player before following them with his whirlwind attack that it was hard to know for sure who he was following. Having this ability clearly mark who he is after would definitely fix the issue of knowing which player he wishes to squish. The damage from his attacks did not feel like the last boss of a dungeon's attacks should feel. His telegraphs hardly broke shields, even though they left behind fire you couldn't stand in they were overall very undertuned. Finally, the distortion mechanic and AoE in the final phase was a very, very, interesting concept that we all enjoyed. As like the other bosses, we believe it was undertuned and too forgiving. We were able to kill this boss without a tank from about 20% of his HP and that made us to believe that tanks aren't exactly needed for dungeons currently, this is implying that you have enough snares and stuns/knockdowns to kite bosses, and have sufficient dps.

Darkwitch Gurka - She owes us some spoils of war. Definitely one of the more tuned fights of the dungeon, but we believe that this is due to her blind mechanic and lifedrain/snare ability. We enjoyed having to dodge while being blinded and felt that you were definitely punished for not moving. One of the issues we found was her Afflicted Soul telegraph had zero lead up to it. We believe that this is definitely an ability that needs some sort of cue because anyone caught will most likely die and heal the boss for a good chunk of her HP. Our solution to this, and we're not sure if this is working as intended, was to simply kite the boss around the room. This caused her to not cast this ability. We theorized that this was because there was no one in melee range when she thought to cast it. Overall, we definitely enjoyed her mechanics but would like to be able to better predict when she'll cast Afflicted Soul.

Trash:

There was a massive amount of trash in this dungeon, most of which can be skipped. We feel that having to kill so many extra trash packs for the optional events will turn many players off from doing them because they can simply just run past and finish the dungeon and do another. A few of the trash packs felt they weren't tuned properly due to the fact the giant slaver was dying faster than her slaves were. The smaller mobs had more HP and what we assumed to be more deflect chance than she did, thus making them harder to kill than the much larger slaver. Also, the anchors that spawn appear to have way too much HP. Sitting at a whopping 10.5k HP. It was more viable to wait for them to disappear and just focus down the other trash. We would like to see their HP lowered, unless not killing them is what was intended.

Miscellaneous:

The scaling down feature was bugged and wouldn't allow us to equip gear that we had found in the dungeon because it was for level 21-23, even though most of us were in our mid 20s. We also felt that milestones should be kept even though stats were lowered, due to some of them being really game changing for healers and tanks. We also noticed that almost no drops off the trash and felt that it would make the trash more exciting if perhaps they were to drop dungeon specific green/blue items. Now that may just be because it hasn't been added and we understand, it just would be nice to see added in to make the sea of trash more worth doing.

We also noticed that the whole interrupt armor system seems to need more of a visual cue for those of us who tend to not stare at boss HP bars. We suggest maybe using the broken shield icon above their head so it's visible right away. There is a slight delay on the update of the bosses actual nameplate for interrupt armor that caused a few issues when trying to stun bosses.