BlackBullWings.2734

noticed some new stuff but barely anything that could be called "new mechanics".

at least you have a reason to stay inside jhavi's shield now, but it doesn't solve the problem of those not going into a raven portal getting bored beyond belief.

boss is still way too repetitive, sad....

Only noticed these:

more damage on attacks

more mobs

tanked up shrine bosses

cc bar took a bit longer but doesnt really matter considering the health of the shield

meteors give a damage buff or something, didn't get punished by them as the patch notes mentioned.

meh...this is 2bad, still very repetitive boss fight.

Played since launch and still having a great time, it's impossible to get into other MMO's just because of how painfully boring and grindy they are. In guild wars 2 whatever I want to do can be done, and they sacrifice of gear stat progression has the advantage that every level 80 zone is more or less not too braindead easy.

I loved heart of thorns, since then however, the quality of open world has been going down. mounts make it too easy to skip everything.

> @"ArchonWing.9480" said:

>

> HoT was pretty good. I remember being worried it was going to be night @ Verdant Brink. But it was fun and people had to work together and stuff.

>

> Now with mounts you can just speed through everything with 0 thought. Who cares about the mobs? I'll just run through all of them. I'll just jump off a cliff with the mount; I won't die! I haven't even done most of PoF because I fall victim more to boredom.

PoF is a great exploration experience, I keep finding new little details every now and then. But I do agree that there's absolutely nothing to do afterwards. No meaningful/interesting events. They don't need to be crazy meta events or anything, but the ones that do exist are pretty mediocre at best.

Also yes, mounts destroy the HoT experience, they weren't meant to be used there clearly. But they are also so OP. It's already crazy that you can mount instantly, but then you get to add a mini nuke with strong CC to your dps rotation, the latter is a bit too much imo.

I remember HoT on release being the most intense PvE experience ever, people were dropping left and right, and that was a good thing. By now we've learned, and powercrept, add to that people complaining that it was "too hard" lol.

Since then the PvE world has been painfully simple. I know you have fractals and raids for challenging content, but feels to me that the open world suffers too much from how casual it is, when it could be doing amazing stuff. Path of Fire has awesome unique mobs, but I've barely ever had a situation (except from hydras), where I'm actively engaged with what the enemies are doing so I can properly play around it, something that heart of thorns did fantastically with their very readable, but deadly enemies.

While I'm a main PvE player and don't bother much with PvP/WvW, I think balance in a player vs player environment is far more important than PvE balance will ever be. This is not to sell short the importance of PvE being balanced, but in PvE you will not face other players, which can potentially abuse a broken balance system, whereas PvE, you might have broken enemies, but you can put effort into understandig them, and have far more room to strategize around that enemy.

My issue with PvE balance is not damage numbers from players, but rather the enemies not being properly scaled, or engaging enough, to pose any challenge or danger to a player. Bjora marches suffers a lot from this, as all the mobs are extremely outdated and pose little to no threat unless they are 10 at the same time spamming homing projectiles at you <- not fun, not engaging, where are our expansion level content enemies?

> @"BlackBullWings.2734" said:

> **How we did it**:

>

should also add:

- you MUST have ranged damage, there's no other way really. Don't worry too much about dps rotations and such, and more about making sure you don't get yeeted by spawned AoE's or the incredibly annoying claw attack

- in regards to the claw attack (the AoE wave that goes forward, sounds like bones rattling and deals a ton of damage). dodge to the left, the attack spawns a second wave to the right.

Further on the claw attack, after he does it once, he will do another spawn AoE under players attack, and THEN he'll do a second claw attack. you should at least have 1 dodge spared for this, as it's an easy tell after the first one came.

Gl if you want a legit challenge. but remember that it's strike missions rewards.

spent 2-3 hours with random pugs yesterday trying to beat the boneskinner. we did it in the end, and it was definitely worth it and a great learning experience as a druid.

**How we did it**:

tons of scourges for barrier. I was druid.

We split in 3 groups, each group making sure 2 torches between them stayed lit.

we made sure to call targets with the target button (Ctrl+T for me), so that people would notice the wisps, and the torches.

at about 76% I'd call torches so that everyone would run behind one.

Rinse and repeat, it gets progressively easier as the boneskinner takes out torches, but its a real struggle especially when the pull happens, as all torches need to be lit asap.

As a druid, I split my long range heals (staff 5, celestial avatar 2 and 3) to the other groups, while i used my short range heals on my own group. the other groups had scourges so that helped a lot. staff 3 allowed me to dash to torches if needed, or burst heal someone, or dash to downed players and revive them with the spirit elite (reaaallly good in this encounter btw).

Was tons of struggle and tons of fun, and any of you who played with me are reading this: "gg ez =)"

**Bugs we noticed are:**

- the random insane dps tick at around after 75%, which appears sometimes, and seemingly out of nowhere

- the hitbox of the Aura around the boneskinner is way bigger than its visual indicates when 2 torches (i think 2) are out.

- some people got stuck inside torches when the pull happened.

- not sure if its a bug or intented, but the red special action key only shows up after the cc phase with boneskinner. i saw not sure bc they do appear when the wisps show up. and I'm wondering if its intended to be used on the wisps.

This is amazing!

Thanks so much for informing us on what we can expect in the coming year!

> @"Randulf.7614" said:

> > @"BlackBullWings.2734" said:

> > > @"Randulf.7614" said:

> > > > @"BlackBullWings.2734" said:

> > > > well it's confirmed by stream guys, drakkar is getting mechanical updates along with its ascended boreal weapon drop chances.

> > > > Thank you arenanet <3

> > >

> > > Good news. Any further details from the stream about it?

> >

> > we had some screenshots shown by the devs of the new ascended boreal weapons.

> > they have a yellow glow and gold trim on certain parts.

> > Also, they said the update would come on the 11th of february

>

> I meant the mechanics which is main interest. The rewards are irrelevant to me since the chance of a drop will likely be so remote I wont see one anyway

no mechanics announced

> @"Randulf.7614" said:

> > @"BlackBullWings.2734" said:

> > well it's confirmed by stream guys, drakkar is getting mechanical updates along with its ascended boreal weapon drop chances.

> > Thank you arenanet <3

>

> Good news. Any further details from the stream about it?

we had some screenshots shown by the devs of the new ascended boreal weapons.

they have a yellow glow and gold trim on certain parts.

Also, they said the update would come on the 11th of february

well it's confirmed by stream guys, drakkar is getting mechanical updates along with its ascended boreal weapon drop chances.

Thank you arenanet <3

Genuinely happy that they chose to tone down the amount of damage, buffing and so on, no more explosive combat, or at least less.

I'll be going back to pvp once this update hits.

"disable other player's back items"

for the love of god yes yes yes!

it's a bit grasping at straws but at this point, anything for dungeons would be awesome.

It wouldn't be too bad tbh, would give you a reason to look around instead of just running superfast speedruns through dungeons.

in the case of icebrood saga I really wouldn't mind if it ends up only being 2 more new maps, I'd rather have them work on already existing content, which is drying up to dust.

Fractals, WvW, PvP, Raids, boring PvE maps and hell even dungeons feel more important to establish solid content, rather than tons of bits of breadcrumbs everywhere.

Although it took them 2 living world episodes, bjora feels like a fairly well done map now, with plenty to do. and grothmar is always fun due to its great events.

But the fact that it takes 2 episode to do this, and that the story is so tied to the map events rather than having their own experiences, for me feels like a really lackluster expansion experience.

And yeah the vote, we want E specs :(

> @"Cyninja.2954" said:

> The only place where dodging actually matters is against usually telegraphed attacks which specifically require a dodge. Most small stuff can be avoided without getting close to the dodge button and failing here is a lack of movement and game understanding.

also, this is not true for a lot of mobs, when you are surrounded by a ton of minions, whose majority of attacks are homing projectiles (in icebrood saga's case, it would be the svanir bowmen's basic attacks for example) you can't just avoid them. now if you are surrounded by a ton of them, this isn't lack of movement or game understanding, this is simply a ton of mobs attacking you at once with dashes, projectiles, AoE's and so on. there's no way you won't get hit, especially when a lot of these attacks proc movement slowing effects. It's outdated combst design, they're vanilla enemies afterall.

> @"Cyninja.2954" said:

> So you stopped dodging, wonder that you are taking more damage, yet it's the games fault?

where have i blamed the game for this? please actually read, I even said " which **ofc **ends up in me going down a couple of fights "

not a single moment have I blamed the game for it.

You're not alone in this. There are a ton of attacks that are insufferably powerful, and barely noticable or telegraphed. I think the new icebrood saga mobs are a big tell of this. I barely ever notice what is hitting me, or if an attack is coming from these mobs, so I'm practically not dodging anymore and just going hard on the dps rotations, which ofc ends up in me going down a couple of fights ;(

I think the BEST example of enemy combat tells done well are the Heart of Thorn mordrem, they either have a really obvious ground indicator of what's coming, or very expressive animations combined with dialogue and sound effects. even the ones that don't have indicators can be predicted and played around once you recognize what their attacks sound like (the mordrem assassin is a great example of this, they teleport near you, then start jumping around throwing daggers while dodging, the sound they make gives them away, giving you a brief moment to dodge). Love these mobs, you actually learn their patterns and move your character accordingly.

The icebrood saga moves on the other had... I have no freaking clue what is happening, I see a ton of projectiles, and a ton of animations that I'm not sure if theyre strong or weak. Sad that they decided to recycle enemies, they couldve at least given them interesting attacks.

> @"TheGrimm.5624" said:

> I have been running with the unfounded and over-optimistic speculation that we will. If we were to see them in this LS it would be earliest in EP3/4.

>

> Unfounded reasons:

> * They said expansion level content, and yes to me that new e-specs

> * We had a reveal of elite style icons that was data-mined

> * They are doing a large balance patch to tone everything we have now down, and they did similar balances before HoT & PoF elites

> * NPCs foreshadowing classes using different weapons

>

> I am not looking to raise anyone else's expectation, go with no and you will be happier.

hold on, elite style icons??? I need to see this

it's really really easy and tedious, but as said before, there's already another thread about this

the drop rate is definitely no just doubled. Some chests are straight up giving 48 ices. Add the events to that, and In 1 day you can have 500 ices with little to no efforts.

Just pay attention, there's like 2 indicators.

Main issues that I see:

- Too easy

- Repetitive

- Takes too long.

- Lack of incentive

**Too easy**: adding more unpredictable attacks, more dangerous AoE's , and simply bumping up some damage numbers would already help a lot. Also, the 3 raven portal bosses are ridiculously easy, actually make them combat worthy. And lastly, add more mobs spawning during the fight just to add pressure to players. I think people were expecting something on the levels of triple trouble, supposedly, that's what was said in a stream, though I can't quote that.

Drakkar is an excellent chance to make proper use of the masteries in some way, but unfortunately, these add no value other than having that free CC that makes the shield bubble part kind of pointless...

**Repetitive**: I think the biggest slap in the face was when drakkar retreats after 20%, it was really cool to transition mid fight to a different part of the map, added a lot of cinematic value, BUT THEN, when you are in this new area, the mechanics stay exactly the same! I think that's where people start getting annoyed/bored at the repetitive nature of the boss (already seen AFK farmers). He needs some unique mechanics after this stage, or after each phase really (after each raven portal).

Also, the shield bubble part, where he attacks from the center, why exactly do we get in the shield bubble? Everyone does it out of instinct, but when I walked out of the bubble during this, nothing really happened, feels almost unintentional.

**Takes too long**: I wouldn't mind this were it not for the 2 problems stated above. But even then, I think the battle could take a tiny bit less, bump down the hp a bit (not much), and it wouldn't feel as grindy to people. An event that takes approx 30 minutes, should stay relevant throughout the 30 minutes, otherwise we get the same problem as the eastern meta of bjora marches.

**Lack of incentive**: no worthy rewards. Though I saw the devs mentioning that drakkar would be updated to be able to drop ascended gear, which is fantastic! What makes me sad though, is that, unlike the other dragon wordboss achievements, drakkar's achievements do not reward a backpack. Give us a backpack arenanet ;-(

With all that being said, the boss is visually stunning, music is beautiful, the area where you fight him is awesome, overal a real wholesome experience, held back by flaws that could be easily fixed.