Campaign Difficulty

[Mediados.5783]

Hi so i havnt played in a while. As an old veteran player it was quite offputting when they released the patch that reworked the campaign system so i was wondering: Has there been any patch that would allow a player to raise the campaign difficulty? I want to be challenged like back then when you ran to the boss naked because your armor was broken from the many deaths.

[Randulf.7614]

None whatsoever. After PoF and LS4, the difficulty eased down a bit for the Icebrood Saga, but there are no difficulty modes or wider use of the challenge mote system to increase difficulty. The general feedback is that new and veteran players seem to not want too much difficulty added to story.

 

Personally I think the challenge mote system should have been used more often for instanced stories, but I guess it would increased development time so balancing around a single difficulty was easier and quicker given how increasingly tight they are on resources

[Danikat.8537]

There are no difficulty settings for most of the game (I'm not sure how that would work with shared maps) but if you want to make it harder there's a few options.

 

The obvious one is to stick to lower tier/level equipment with lower stats, and skip upgrades like runes and sigils. But it might take some experimentation to find the point that's right for you and I recommend keeping a set of exotics just in case you run into something you find more difficult. Some people stick to an intermediate level like using all rares or level 70 gear, but others will take it to extremes. even using nothing but white gear.

 

What might be more fun but has mixed results is to use 'novelty' builds - pick whichever skills you think would be fun or deliberately pick ones you know are weaker or don't work as well together. It's not a consistent way to make it harder because plenty of builds which aren't popular or well known or don't fit the conventional wisdom of how to play actually work perfectly well, especially for the story and open-world activities, so it might be harder than it seems to make something which actually increases the difficulty, but it can be fun to try.

[BlueJin.4127]

It would be very easy to add a personalized difficulty setting that affects all stories and open world content.

 

Turn on easy mode: You get a buff that increases damage you deal to enemies and reduces damage you take from enemies. You get slightly less loot and XP.

Turn on hard mode: You get a buff that decreases damage you deal to enemies and increases damage you take from enemies. You get slightly more loot and XP.

 

Since the buff only affects you, multiple players fighting the same enemies in the same map can have their own difficulty set. To prevent abuse, you can only raise difficulty in the character select screen.

 

However, whether this is a good idea or not is questionable. With all the visual clutter, I don't see myself using hard mode in metas. They need to fix this mess, first. Plus, this would simply make the mindless metas last longer if the better players are dealing less damage. Also, no doubt, there will be less skilled players just leeching off of veterans' effort by playing in hard mode when they're clearly not good enough to play in hard mode. Maybe only add difficulty settings for solo story instances, I don't know.

[Dirame.8521]

> @"Randulf.7614" said:

> None whatsoever. After PoF and LS4, the difficulty eased down a bit for the Icebrood Saga, but there are no difficulty modes or wider use of the challenge mote system to increase difficulty. The general feedback is that new and veteran players seem to not want too much difficulty added to story.

>

> Personally I think the challenge mote system should have been used more often for instanced stories, but I guess it would increased development time so balancing around a single difficulty was easier and quicker given how increasingly tight they are on resources

 

Funny. I guess that's what you get when you don't make your game challenging from the get-go or you don't build a proper difficulty curve into a game. It's sad to think that players won't be getting anything like Liadri again.

[Danikat.8537]

> @"BlueJin.4127" said:

> It would be very easy to add a personalized difficulty setting that affects all stories and open world content.

>

> Turn on easy mode: You get a buff that increases damage you deal to enemies and reduces damage you take from enemies. You get slightly less loot and XP.

> Turn on hard mode: You get a buff that decreases damage you deal to enemies and increases damage you take from enemies. You get slightly more loot and XP.

>

> Since the buff only affects you, multiple players fighting the same enemies in the same map can have their own difficulty set. To prevent abuse, you can only raise difficulty in the character select screen.

 

We had something like that in the early days of the game: Magic Find was an attribute like any other instead of an account bonus, so to raise your magic find you had to use equipment with it as one of the bonuses, which of course meant you lost another stat and either did less damage or took more damage as a result.

 

The end result was a lot of toxicity because players would build for maximum magic find, then try to group with people who weren't doing that, so the rest of the group would make up for their lower performance and they'd get more loot as a result. Some people would even carry a second set of equipment they had no intention of using or learned to fake chat codes so they could pretend they were using something useful to get into groups.

 

It caused so many problems Anet completed re-worked magic find and several of the stat combinations to remove it from equipment and make it into an account-wide bonus which is managed independantly of other attributes.

[Yggranya.5201]

> @"Danikat.8537" said:

> The end result was a lot of toxicity because players would build for maximum magic find, then try to group with people who weren't doing that, so the rest of the group would make up for their lower performance and they'd get more loot as a result. Some people would even carry a second set of equipment they had no intention of using or learned to fake chat codes so they could pretend they were using something useful to get into groups.

>

> It caused so many problems Anet completed re-worked magic find and several of the stat combinations to remove it from equipment and make it into an account-wide bonus which is managed independantly of other attributes.

 

Ah, good ol' MMO "team work" at play. And still some people dare wonder why i avoid others in games.

 

> @"BlueJin.4127" said:

> Turn on easy mode: You get a buff that increases damage you deal to enemies and reduces damage you take from enemies. You get slightly less loot and XP.

> Turn on hard mode: You get a buff that decreases damage you deal to enemies and increases damage you take from enemies. You get slightly more loot and XP.

 

No normal/medium mode? Unless you mean normal is the basic mode when you don't turn either of those two on? If so, you can disregard this.

[moony.5780]

I really wish there was a difficulty :( I love solo open world the most in this game...but its sooo extremly crazily easy.

I really miss the hardmode in gw1

 

At least i just need like 40h more of pvp farming to get the full legendary armor....so i can make any weak build i want and test which one fits the best for me

[Hannelore.8153]

The difficulty's fine, I can one-shot five boars at once while some newbie is trying to get them for a heart quest. (This isn't a serious post, but this is really how half the player base seems to think based upon past threads.)

 

Some story missions have a Challenge Mote, or scale with the number of players. That's about it.

[moony.5780]

> @"Hannelore.8153" said:

> The difficulty's fine, I can one-shot five boars at once while some newbie is trying to get them for a heart quest. (This isn't a serious post, but this is really how half the player base seems to think based upon past threads.)

 

Tottaly agree !!!! It need a loot of work to not kill everything so fast (which have no benefit at all, except beeing nice to others)

 

It is a normal thing that everyone try to get the best possible build and armor, people spent over 400h just to do that....and for what? that u r the evil guy and everyone hates beeing with u during some events (meta events r different).

 

Also if someone spent over 2000 hours to play 1 class perfect and is a very good player....and for what? You are the super evil guy and because you also know the spawns noone except you get rewards from an event (while u just play normal without notecing...)

 

So now if i want to have fun in open world...i need to ignore all the progress i made..i need to abonden everything i worked hard for...why should i even play the game and get better if it just punishes me + a whole lot of other player?

 

It would make so much more sense if someone could adjust the difficulty + get rewards to work on them (dont need to be extra loot..but maybe special titels for not beeing killed for like 100 hours, or make a map completation while not dying 1 time, find a special event and not get hit by xy...and all that while haveing a small debuff)

 

And btw...not everyone likes raiding :/

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

I dunno. Sounds like this issue is in lower-level maps. Try some of the L80 maps outside Core Tyria?

 

p.s. What is a campaign? (We only had campaigns in Guild Wars.) Do you mean expansion? Living World content? Something else?

[moony.5780]

Honestly even all other lvl 80 areas r too weak for me....only super fun place for me is the lvl 80 centaur camp from LS3. But if everything would be like this at least 50% of the player will leave gw2. I wish people could choose their own difficulty lvl...

[Shadowmoon.7986]

Compare the son of sanvir in bitterfrost to the same ones in bjora marches. Anet has given up on challenging their players to get better ever since PoF was released. Unfortunately, outside of t4 fractal, some strikes, and raids, everything can be completed by the 1 spamming unwashed masses.

[Gorani.7205]

> @"Mediados.5783" said:

> Hi so i havnt played in a while. As an old veteran player it was quite offputting when they released the patch that reworked the campaign system so i was wondering: Has there been any patch that would allow a player to raise the campaign difficulty? I want to be challenged like back then when you ran to the boss naked because your armor was broken from the many deaths.

 

Don't use mounts for fast map travelling (this will make core & HoT maps more difficult in general), use mounts in PoF only for places designed for that (e.g. sand portals)

Play with a core profession instead of an Xpac Elite, when you start a new profession. Those will be less (well, lesser) boosted by power creep skills.

Don't equip yourself with ascended armour (or instant exotics) when you start fresh. It will be a lot more difficult if you just use the items dropped for you or those you can buy from (core) Tyria (heart) vendors for karma.

Some group events (mostly PoF and LS) are incredibly unbalanced find those and try to beat them alone for fun.

Not running a meta build most likely will drop you damage output by 20% (that's why you see the same builds all over the place with "efficient" people)

I haven't run dungeons in a while, but I think that most of them are still difficult to do alone.

[Hesione.9412]

> @"moony.5780" said:

> > @"Hannelore.8153" said:

> > The difficulty's fine, I can one-shot five boars at once while some newbie is trying to get them for a heart quest. (This isn't a serious post, but this is really how half the player base seems to think based upon past threads.)

>

> Tottaly agree !!!! It need a loot of work to not kill everything so fast (which have no benefit at all, except beeing nice to others)

>

> It is a normal thing that everyone try to get the best possible build and armor, people spent over 400h just to do that....and for what? that u r the evil guy and everyone hates beeing with u during some events (meta events r different).

>

> Also if someone spent over 2000 hours to play 1 class perfect and is a very good player....and for what? You are the super evil guy and because you also know the spawns noone except you get rewards from an event (while u just play normal without notecing...)

>

> So now if i want to have fun in open world...i need to ignore all the progress i made..i need to abonden everything i worked hard for...why should i even play the game and get better if it just punishes me + a whole lot of other player?

>

> It would make so much more sense if someone could adjust the difficulty + get rewards to work on them (dont need to be extra loot..but maybe special titels for not beeing killed for like 100 hours, or make a map completation while not dying 1 time, find a special event and not get hit by xy...and all that while haveing a small debuff)

>

> And btw...not everyone likes raiding :/

 

I'm not sure of your point. Are you saying that you are okay with possibly creating a negative experience for newer players?

 

How can you not notice that you're the one killing everything while the new players around you aren't getting the chance to hit anything, because it dies before they get credit?

 

Hannelore.8153 was being sarcastic. I don't know whether you are being sarcastic too, or serious. If the former, then I agree with the lack of empathy from players who do that.

[moony.5780]

> @"Hesione.9412" said:

> I'm not sure of your point. Are you saying that you are okay with possibly creating a negative experience for newer players?

 

No im not ok with this. But thats what is happening right now by default. So increasing the campain difficulty is a good solution. The solution to make oneself weaker by bad gear/traits is a very poor solution because only like 10% of the player use it. Also it feels like ignoring all the hard work someone had to become a good player. Thats why i think the game should be changed and a stronger debuff for vetrans should be introduced.

 

> @"Hesione.9412" said:

> How can you not notice that you're the one killing everything while the new players around you aren't getting the chance to hit anything, because it dies before they get credit?

It is really possible to not notice that! For sure not all the time, except someone is really dont care about others...

So if someone is aware of the problem but fully geared, only hit 1 time each monster and took like 50% health away, then it still just need 1 new player to kill the rest and the other 3 new player get no reward. Even my old father who have no real gaming experience other than strategy games can kill a monster with 2 hits! So this game is faaar too easy and causes unbalance during events.

I think it would be great if events were much more difficult..and so everyone have a chance to enjoy the fight and get loot. Random monster + heart quests should stay easy, so that new player can still feel strong.

 

> @"Hesione.9412" said:

> Hannelore.8153 was being sarcastic. I don't know whether you are being sarcastic too, or serious. If the former, then I agree with the lack of empathy from players who do that.

 

Im serious.

But what im saying is, that the game how it is, will make a typical player a very bad person for not so experienced player.

I think all player should be able to play side by side and support each other and enjoy the game. Thats why downgrading excists. But its clearly not balanced enough for vetrans.

 

 

[Hesione.9412]

> @"moony.5780" said:

> > @"Hesione.9412" said:

> > I'm not sure of your point. Are you saying that you are okay with possibly creating a negative experience for newer players?

>

> No im not ok with this. But thats what is happening right now by default. So increasing the campain difficulty is a good solution. The solution to make oneself weaker by bad gear/traits is a very poor solution because only like 10% of the player use it. Also it feels like ignoring all the hard work someone had to become a good player. Thats why i think the game should be changed and a stronger debuff for vetrans should be introduced.

>

> > @"Hesione.9412" said:

> > How can you not notice that you're the one killing everything while the new players around you aren't getting the chance to hit anything, because it dies before they get credit?

> It is really possible to not notice that! For sure not all the time, except someone is really dont care about others...

> So if someone is aware of the problem but fully geared, only hit 1 time each monster and took like 50% health away, then it still just need 1 new player to kill the rest and the other 3 new player get no reward. Even my old father who have no real gaming experience other than strategy games can kill a monster with 2 hits! So this game is faaar too easy and causes unbalance during events.

> I think it would be great if events were much more difficult..and so everyone have a chance to enjoy the fight and get loot. Random monster + heart quests should stay easy, so that new player can still feel strong.

>

> > @"Hesione.9412" said:

> > Hannelore.8153 was being sarcastic. I don't know whether you are being sarcastic too, or serious. If the former, then I agree with the lack of empathy from players who do that.

>

> Im serious.

> But what im saying is, that the game how it is, will make a typical player a very bad person for not so experienced player.

> I think all player should be able to play side by side and support each other and enjoy the game. Thats why downgrading excists. But its clearly not balanced enough for vetrans.

>

 

Oh, I agree with you, except for players should be able to see that they are killing things in 1-2 hits during events, with lower level players around them not being able to get credit.

 

This is why I think the best solution would be to remove the "do 4 events in this relatively low level map" daily from those available to level 80s. The mentors in those maps know that they are helping new players, because they are altruistic enough to put up a mentor tag and help with questions (I've seen mentors do this on starting maps).

 

To be fair, I don't think that most of the higher level players are intentionally trolling the newer, low level players. I am firmly of the opinion that it is lack of mindfulness/being only focussed on getting that daily finished as fast as possible which is the problem. And that is (hopefully easily) solved with my remove-from-dailies-rotation suggestion.

 

I really enjoy this game and I would like new players to have the same opportunity to really enjoy it too.

[Noodle Ant.1605]

amusingly drms technically fits into this topic, you can solo them and put whatever cms on to your hearts content, counts as ‘campaign’/story too lol

 

if youre bored you can also try teaching ppl how to ‘play’ properly too

[maddoctor.2738]

> @"Mediados.5783" said:

> Hi so i havnt played in a while. As an old veteran player it was quite offputting when they released the patch that reworked the campaign system so i was wondering: Has there been any patch that would allow a player to raise the campaign difficulty? I want to be challenged like back then when you ran to the boss naked because your armor was broken from the many deaths.

 

I think you don't remember it very well. The only place people run naked back on release/beta was in dungeons, and that was because they allowed corpse rushing in the first place. Die, waypoint, dps boss, die, waypoint, dps boss until you win. That was what created the challenge back in the early days but that was "fixed" very early. Since you are talking about campaign, I assume you are talking about the core game story, that is easy on purpose, it's where new players begin their experience. Remember you can skip the core game story on your alts, start your next characters directly in the expansion (once you reach 80 of course) and you will have the challenge you want.

[maddoctor.2738]

> @"Dirame.8521" said:

> Funny. I guess that's what you get when you don't make your game challenging from the get-go or you don't build a proper difficulty curve into a game. It's sad to think that players won't be getting anything like Liadri again.

 

By design, there is no actual difficulty curve in this game. You can play Path of Fire before Heart of Thorns, you can play Episode 4 of Season 3, before Episode 3 of Season 3. The entire game can be played out of order, that's the way they monetize it. That's why it's impossible to have an ever increasing difficulty curve as they will never know with which content a player will start, so one episode might be really hard, next one easy, next one hard, there is very little consistency, but that's by design.

[kharmin.7683]

If a player is looking for more challenging content, then why is s/he playing a maxed out level character in low core Tyria zones?

[moony.5780]

World completation, playing with friends, collecting materials

[kharmin.7683]

I wouldn't call those objectives "challenging content".

[Khisanth.2948]

> @"Hesione.9412" said:

> To be fair, I don't think that most of the higher level players are intentionally trolling the newer, low level players. I am firmly of the opinion that it is lack of mindfulness/being only focussed on getting that daily finished as fast as possible which is the problem. And that is (hopefully easily) solved with my remove-from-dailies-rotation suggestion.

 

People are just putting in more effort than they need to.

 

Fastest completion of those dailies is actually to kill 3 or 4 mobs then bounce off to a different event unless it is one of the events that can fail. Although that also requires people to actually understand how different types of events work.

[Mediados.5783]

Oh damn this forum is a lot more active than i ever expected.

I appreciate your different ideas guys, thanks. I will probably roll with avoiding exotic equiment and using drops and quest rewards for my base game. As soon as i reach HoT and PoF there are difficulty options appearantly, so thats not an issue.

Still miss when you could do Campaign quests when you were 2 levels below. I hope Arenanet will some day rework that again.