Your thoughts on the Titan Hard Mode quests

If you think these quests were challenging, you're playing a different game than me I think.

The problem is, as pointed out by Kunder I think, that instead of improving AI (Especially the aggro and balling AI needs to get improved), they decided to throw gimmick bars on the foes and increase their level to a redicilous standard.

I mean, I like the fact that Anet finally understands a good bar makes up for atleast 50% of the victory in GW. I also like the fact that Anet put in skills to counter meta builds (Minion steal, non spell enchant strip, PBAoE bypassing spell immunity, ...).

The problem is that the monsters are still dumb as shit, so they have to bring those bars to redicilous power levels in order to mechanically overcome the gap between player and monster skill. (Which is not a good thing)

What you end up with is a completely imbalanced questline which can not beat by conventional balanced teams. Instead, you'll have to rely on the most overpowered gimmicks in the game to find yourself beating these quests with relative ease. Sure, they took a day or 2 to complete, but that's solely cuz I spend 5 minutes chopping away a single group because prot spirit, SoA and shielding hands on top of WoH are so redicilously strong at 20 attribute points. I've fought groups of up to 4 of those heals with only a shatter and a rip. (This was obviously my first attempt before I knew there'dd be so many enchants)

Now, some people such as Jeydra, confuse this for challenging, but it's not. GvG and HA to certain extends still are challenging. These PvE quests are not. You don't need amazing aggro abilities (because AI is so bad), you don't need amazing micro (The only micro I found myself using was flagging heroes, and even that barely mattered), you simply don't need to play good at Guild Wars to beat these quests. What you need is the right equipment and the right skill bars, and even a person completely new to GW will eventually plow through these quests with ease. To me, it felt like tedious grind because either I was getting rolled by mechanics beyond my fysical abilities as a player (Read: build and limited Hero controlability) or I was steamrolling through them without any effort whatsoever.

There was no feeling of: "I just lost because I messed up" rather than a: "I lost because I brought the wrong skills" or "I lost because for some reason my heroes ignore their flags and died from 2 searing flames".

Long story, only read if interested:

But the crown definatly goes to The Last Day dawns. I litterealy ran through all the other quests with little to no effort, but the TLDD is the most tedious quest I've ever done. I must've tried it 50 times before I finally succeeded at it. And that was solely based on 1 fact: The King and his minions kept suiciding in, in some case dying before my healer hero was even in range to infuse him.

Now, obviously it took me many tries to perfect my build (I barely ever use PvE skills, so it took me a while to experiment with different skills against the charr), but the matter of fact is that I always found myself comming to the conclusion it simply was beyond me. I had no control over the fact that the King would suicide in and his team is so terrible scaled against the power level of these charr.

So while constantly changing my bars almost every attempt, I also came to the conclusion that your chances of succeeding almost interely rest on the first spawn the king and his minions run for. If they consisted out of a healer and 2 melee's, you could not even engage and the King and his group would survive with ease. (Altough they'dd get raped by the first incomming Lord group) If the charr group, however, concister out of 2 or even 3 Healers (rits) and a fire ele, the king's group would die oftentimes before you could even reach them. The king himself was scaled a bit better, but he would often be at 50% health before my first hero reached him. (Though fallback did make this better) -Ancester's rage is 80% of the problem there)

So while I just spend major micro and macro (energy, etc) resources on keeping just the king up, I had to fight up against the initial group of charr which, when consisting out of 2 healers, can take a while to kill aswell as the first incomming group which absolutely dominate whatever is left of the king's group, if not the king himself.

In the end, I finally managed to beat the quest with ease using nothing but lame cookie cutter builds on all my heroes and myself. I also didn't beat it because I was more skilled, or even better equipped than before (altough I had slightly better bars than my first attempt), I beat it because I finally understood the key to beating this quest is getting a good spawn, and then rushing towards the King like a mad man, whereas I intitially wanted to beat it through decent positioning and balanced micro usage. And truly: I dominated the quest so hard once I realize my playstyle was wrong. (I went for a skillfull, micro-heavy, slow playstyle)

TLDR; The quest isn't hard, beating it requires luck, gimmick builds and a gimmick playstyle. (Steamroll, forget everything and focus on one thing)

If I could give any advice to Anet for future quests:

- Keep the intelligent multi-profession skill bars. They're probably the best part of these quests.

- Nerf gimmick builds (This implies both players running them, aswell as foes. I should not be facing a team with 3 copies of Panic when there is no magic box option for your heroes to flag them in. -the bottom 4-)

- Scale the intire quest, not just enemies. (Read Last Day Dawns part)

- Increase aggro and positioning AI; tank and spank still makes it way to easy (The way I did it as a warrior). AoE is the icing on the cake, especially skills which don't even trigger current AI such as splinter or the many mesmer skills.

Is this not a cue for '90%' of parties to stop being so bloody stupid?
I've only done Defend Droknar's Forge and I'm pretty sure it would be doable without Rit spirits, without Panic and without Save Yourselves. That said, I would not like to go in again without some form of good disruption and I would definitely take minions.
The threats were mainly the Mesmers and the AoE damage put out by the Eles. the physicals could do damage too but I never really noticed them; perhaps because only a few were alive at any one time. They didn't hold a candle to the Warriors in the Summit ranks in Slaver's Exile anyway.
And the Monks would have been much worse had they been equipped with Spirit Bond and Word of Healing over Prot Spirit and Healing Burst.
And they had laughable condition and hex removal.

OK, as of this moment, the "GW is too easy" crowd has 0 credibility points left with me. If the new HM quests are too easy for you lot, go play some other game, preferably one that I'll never even hear of. Same as those who miss more grind and similar - you can have other games, I hear Nintendo caters to those who crave difficulty, but leave GW alone for me any my kind.

He never said GW was too easy...

If you take 50 attempts to beat a quest I don't see how you can not consider it challenging - especially since I finished on my first try. Also Adelbern is hard to kill; he's not only level 30, he's got freaking Defy Pain ...

No, I won't say these quests are too easy. I just don't think they are difficult at all.

Kunder has a point. I never thought about it that way, but come to think of it I did roll through these quests with unaltered hero builds. That's against level 40 monsters. My teambuilds and I have gone from killing level 24-28 monsters to killing level 40+ monsters without breaking stride. Is that something to be worried about?

I'm talking about the entire "GW is too easy" crowd, taking their arguments together. Otherwise I'd have to quote dozens of posters from dozens of threads to specify who exactly said what. Even on this page alone, see how Xenomortis declared those who have trouble "Stupid", Killed u man seems to think he's playing another game all together, etc. The mindset seems clear.

I didn't have the titans builds known ahead of time when I took on the quests. Panic and prot mesmers were actually a surprise. Countering Panic by spreading around would take dozens of clicks to spread the party around (GW1 could use a "spread out" key from an RTS, btw) while playing my own character AND still try to micro just the right builds, no, that's simply too much micro for me to pull off. I tried, and at times succeeded and at times failed, resulting in quite some powerstones needed to work off DP from failed attempts.

That's because our current builds have long adapted to a state where we render level alone meaningless. Protective spirit, Shelter & co lower all the damage, no matter the enemy level, attack type and ability, to the same acceptable levels that the healers can counter. Without them, relieing solely on armor, blind and block? I'm not sure we'd make it.

They could have used a bit more polishing but all in all it was enjoyable. Defend Droks was way too long and tedious...North Kryta Province was by far the most difficult of the bunch as a 6-man team.

Couldn't be done without damage reduction of some type and that was a good point Kunder made. Interrupts/Daze only gets you so far when the Titans can hit into the 300s if they get through with something like Ride the Lightning.

Also, I never bothered to flag out of Panic. At best you could move your top 3 heroes but that would require planning to get your most valuable ones into the top 3 slots. Interrupting it goes a lot further than constant partywide micro in that case.

You've either mistaken what I said for something else or simply want to be self-righteous. Do not put words in the mouth of others.
Try reading it again and pay attention to the quote.

PvE is, by and large, easy. Indeed if there exist builds that steam-roll near everything with minimal effort then clearly PvE is easy. (This doesn't disallow outliers; it would be unfair of me to say that it was easy to take heroes through the Underworld or Domain of Anguish.)
This comes largely from the fact that we're dealing with the AI and a completely known set of challenges.
This does however, allow the vast majority of PvE players to be pretty bad at the game (for an example, join a PUG for the ZQuests and request that people ping their bars and watch chaos ensue). There are other reasons as to why these players are bad though.

What I would like to see people do is fail and then learn to improve. Right now they just wipe, eat some DP removal and carry on as before. For example, you said:

And yet this could have saved you deaths. 8 clicks (or for me, 4 key presses and 4 mouse clicks) saved me from wiping when I realised they had cast Panic on my balled up heroes. Apart from that, the only micro I did was clicking on the Pain of Disenchantment* icon on one of my Necromancer heroes and the odd time I'd precast spirits before aggroing. Both were done only occasionally.


I don't mean that as a personal attack. There was a time when I would have outright failed this quest. I, for a long time, struggled with a fair bit of HM content, but I did improve. I learned how to create better builds, how to aggro better and how to make use of simple but effective techniques (like for instance, flagging out of heroes).
Is it wrong for me to want that to be encouraged to the playerbase so they might improve? Perhaps you might say that many don't care enough about improving, but I don't really buy that; people don't like failing. However, if you do claim that then don't you dare complain when we say that something is easy.**


*Not intentional build wars; I was warned about the Monks prior to my attempt by a friend but figured I could simply brute force them out with Fevered Dreams. I was just running a more defensive, caster ball, setup and I prefer PoD over any other Curses elite.

**I'm not saying so much that these quests were easy, I've only done one of them and have only attempted The Last Day Dawns once (I failed pretty quickly due to an attention lapse; I was intercepted by a titan mob I didn't see coming), but I will say that the one I did do wasn't difficult.

My tone might be a bit sharp, but then, after two consecutive posts, one deriding people who find that things in GW can be challenging by claiming they must be playing another game and one calling people who have trouble with these quests stupid, I think some sharpness is called for. Or perhaps, even better, some other posters could soften their posts' tones.

The comment about wanting people to fail is also not particularly endearing - DP removing consumables still cost money, in case of Powerstones, quite a lot of money. Not to mention that you seem to have forgotten that at least two of those quests ARE failable. Only Defend Droknar's forge and Defend Denravi will let you grind through slowly. Defend nothern Kryta province and The last day dawns are failable. Unless you are really really really careful, and read wiki discussions, and pre-clear the Ascalon version. It should be possible, of course, except that I, with 7000+ hours of GW and having done the NM Titan quests
could not lure the last group of titans to me and got wiped several times in the process of pre-clearing.

A small detail: 4 key presses and 4 mouse clicks took me, just now, 4 seconds. 4 seconds of me not using my own skills, not using my PvE and similar key skills, and enough time for the enemy to use about 3-4 skills per enemy. With the damage those titans dish out, let me tell you that I've several times had a team that usually clears HM dungeons on C-space, fail to kill even a single ice titan enemy.

Of course the HM titan quests are doable - I've done 4 of 5 myself. But they are not easy and they do offer a solid challenge.

I don't understand why microing heroes is that big of a deal for people. You can still use C+Space + hotkeys for skill while using your mouse to micro, can u not?

I also didn't say these quests were to easy, neither did I say they were too hard. The quest are hard in the sense of: you need to be able to know and accept the basics of guild wars. You need to know what builds to run. However, once you have a grasp of the latter 2, you'll find that these quests are redicilously easy. Aggro some, kill them off while staying alive, rince, repeat. It's really just doing the same thing over and over again, with the different that in some quests, the foes come to you.

Surely, you might get overrun by them, but that's only proof either your heroes aren't doing their job (shitty bars, no micro whatsoever, ...) or you'r being absolutely terrible. If you play with the least bit of attention span, you shouldn't have troubles with these quests, as long as you keep playing one dimensional: aggro one group, kill, regen, repeat.

However, for a player who has already conquered most other formats in GW, this simply offers nothing new, but grind. Slow repetitive grind.

This "challenge" you're talking about consists of nothing more than knowing the GW basics (longbow to pull one group, flagging heroes) and the builds to run. (Which are starting to pop up now on wiki).

And if anno 2011 people have so much troubles with these things, then that is only proof that the past 5 years the PvE community has been dumbed down to redicilous levels, because really: The Titan quests are not that hard. There's no complicated mechanics, there's no weird objectives, there's no unexpected variables, it's good old GW at twice the level and a better skill bar.

Also, I don't concider the 50 times it took me to beat TLDD challenging. I was not having the feeling I needed to improve, rather the need to improve my and my heroes bars emerged. And the only reason it took me so long is because I was initially against modding my heroes bars because I don't like to rebuy runes, save old bars, save old equipment, etc. Usually if the current hero bar doesn't work, I just take another hero rather than mod the hero.

After 50 tries, I realized it wasn't going to go this way, I let go of my stubbornness and just modded the hero bars. It succeeded the quest on my second try, after the first one failed because trip rit spawn. The was no need to improve at GW whatsoever, rather a need to change my lazy attitude when it comes to hero bars. I don't concider that challenging.

It's hard to know what challenge could look like when 7 AI are basically playing the game for you. If you want to change that you just end up having to hone in on specific hero builds the AI doesn't mess too badly, and/or micro them more. Maybe we could somehow turn the clock back to DoA on release when 2-man heroway was completely unheard of, but that's more 7H fails utterly than being a challenge.

I personally loved the challenge. It was the first time in a while I rly had to use my brain while playing PvE, as I usually roll the same gimmick build everywhere.
I expected Titan Source to be the most difficult but it proved to be a walk in a park in comparison do Defend North Kryta.

Heroes aren't the problem GW is so easy. (Altough they obviously contribute) Skills ran on those heroes are.

I don't think that really answered anything. What would something "challenging" look like with heroes regardless of what skills are being run? "Challenge" requires intelligent response to overcome difficult conditions. Yet you are just 1 player cog in a 7 hero machine, unless you are microing those heroes like crazy. Randomly dying or wiping because your heroes randomly failed is not difficulty. No matter how smart the AI, heroes are not human intelligence and cannot be challenged.

Aggro control and positioning to abuse it are one of the strongest things a single player in a hero machine can offer their party. If you make enemies intelligent enough that they cannot be controlled in this matter, you've actually removed one of the things that allows player intelligence to become relevant. All you are left with after that removal is micro and focus fire. And if you have a distaste for the former then all you got is the latter.

I don't see this as very different from why Hero Battles failed so hard as a competitive format. Yes imbalance was an issue, but it wasn't just that defensive capway was way too good. It's that many defensive capway matches were decided by which hero randomly tripped up on the way to another shrine. Even with the amount of micro displayed by top players, there's still a huge random factor in relying on the GW AI to even follow your commands, let alone do things correctly without them. It just comes back to letting AIs play in the space of humans, and somehow expecting AIs to require or exhibit skill the same way we expect humans in their slots would. They don't and can't have skill; they are just AIs.

I remember trying the originals, pre-Factions, with PuGs (we all make mistakes in life). What is my incentive to try them in HM when I know I'll be forced into over-loading bars with power creep or using a gimmick play style just to have a chance? I'm not saying I want it easy, but I'm sick of this approach to "difficulty", especially when several professions, my main included, are so utterly gimped it just becomes ridiculous to put up with, so I don't.

Short answer : IT'S BLOODY HARD AS HELL !!!11one

Long answer : I've tried only Defend Droks so far. Took me 3 attempts at very first and second mob until i adjusted the hero builds. After that i used full set cons because it would take more than 1-2 min of fight per group otherwise (pulling , waiting etc). Having to fight vs 4 healers is nightmare, even with a lot of rupts. It took me 30-35 min to get the boss. Wiped 2 times there and decided to give up because i didn't have dp removal. I ran some kind of ... lets say balanced builds. Although i wouldn't dare to go without SY. But psychic instability and inspired hex (for panic) on my mesmers made things more comfortable.

Question : How did you beat him? He can't be pulled and separated and the flagging and spreading of heroes is hard because path is very narrow.

I don't see how you struggled with the Boss. He's not particularly threatening and I don't remember his group being any harder than the rest. I think I just flagged my heroes in square, one flag on each corner, as I usually do in tight spaces. Although I haven't tried this quest on a melee character.
And if you're having to fight 4 of the monks at once then you're doing something wrong - kill any monks before killing the mesmers.

4 monks were the result of unfortunate spawn and 2 groups, it only happened once.

You have boss, 2 titans, 2-3 of those big melee characters , mesmer or 2 (i think) and healer.
It's not the usual group.

Splits don't count as part of the 'main' group so if you are having a lot of trouble with it try a hit and run tactic. This works particularly well if you accidentally get a lot of monks.