GW2 – HoT Chapters 15-16
373 words.
Just a brief GW2 update, mainly to keep up my streak of daily posts this month:
I completed HoT chapter 15, which went okay, despite the AI bugs and random weirdness that always goes along with GW2 story instances. (My crew ran across an invisible bridge to join a fight on the other side of a chasm, so I glided over to follow them, but the fight was just for show and I couldn’t actually kill anything. Turns out I was supposed to stay on my side of the chasm and free Zojja, which whom I never even saw the first time.)
Then I started chapter 16, presumably the last one, which begins in exactly the place where chapter 15 ends.
The last chapter is, not surprisingly, a boss fight. It’s one of those kinds of boss fights… the GW2 mega-multi-phased kind which are incredibly long and tedious and if you mess up just a little bit, it’s back to the beginning to start over again.
Again, I’m reminded of Dark Souls. Except Souls bosses are much less tedious.
I tried that last GW2 boss twice, and it took 37 minutes from the beginning of combat to the end of the rage-quitting for the night. That’s 37 minutes to try a boss fight TWICE. ALMOST FORTY MINUTES.
I’m actually over-simplifying it a little bit. It was two bosses, which I got through, then a third boss, which I tried twice. Thankfully if you die during the third boss, you only have to retry that third boss. My last attempt took 10 minutes, and at the end of that 10 minutes when I died, the boss still had a bit over 50% health.
So in the end, my final award for most annoying HoT chapter, hands down, goes to: Chapter 16, “Hearts and Minds.” Even the title is annoying. :)
I might try it later on the weekend or something, when forty minutes doesn’t seem like such a huge amount of time. But otherwise, I’ll just move on to the Living Story Season 3.
Update PSA: DO NOT rage quit the instance if you get killed fighting Mordremoth like I did. You’ll have to fight your way ALL the way back to him again.
Archived Comments
Athie 2017-08-18T12:16:58Z Yes, it’s a miserable sequence of boss fights. My personal annoyance? There is no repair station at the point where you respawn after dying. So if you just keep banging away trying to learn the fights and your gear breaks: (a) start all over again, or (b) buy a cash shop gear repair item. Why?
Aywren Sojourner 2017-08-18T15:47:25Z Ugh. I hate GW2 style boss scenarios. It’s always a case of die, rez, rush back to the boss before their life goes back up, repeat. Thanks for the heads up… I’ll bring the repair cans I’ve stashed away once I get there.
bhagpuss 2017-08-18T17:16:45Z
FFS! Wordpress is getting on my nerves! It currently pushes the “Post Comment” button off the bottom of the page if the comment gets too long, in both Firefox and Chrome. I had to use Edge (!!) to get it to work, by which time I had the wrong text in the clipboard!
Okay, this is the full comment - please delete the last one!
Every time they do a new LS chapter ANet post an official “feedback” thread and every time I complain about the instanced boss fight. There always is one. It is always awful. Many - MANY - other players also complain but some of them complain that the boss fights are too easy. Clearly there need to be difficulty options, as there would be in a single player game. Personally I’d also go for the option to skip the fights entirely and just watch the cut scenes.
The good news is that the last couple of LS boss fights, towards the end of LS3, were significantly easier so it seems they might finally be paying some attention to the feedback. Even so, they were still far too long and far too tedious.
The Mordremoth fight in Hearts and Minds is, in my opinion, nowhere near as bad as some of the LS boss fights. I didn’t do it solo, though. I did it in a duo and it’s probably fair to say that the real “easy mode” for most GW2 instances is to group for them. Sometimes they are scripted in such a way that it’s counterproductive but mostly they benefit enormously from having several players doing different things at the same time.
Oh, and the really important thing about that “ending” is that it isn’t the real ending at all. The real ending is the huge Dragon’s Stand meta event which is really, really good. That got near-universal praise back when it was new (well, apart from the bugs) and is what GW2 is all about - huge battles involving dozens of players. I did it many times for the pure pleasure of doing it and still do on occasion.
UltrViolet 2017-08-18T17:27:16Z Don’t worry, this time you don’t have to rush back because they start at full health every time. :(
UltrViolet 2017-08-18T17:33:37Z
Sorry about the comment issues. :( Maybe I need to update my theme or something.
As much as I complained about Mordremoth, I still think it was a bit easier than the last Living Story Season 2 fight, which I thought was ridiculous. It just kept repeating the same mechanics over and over and over again. “Yay, player, you made it through the hard part! Here, do it again! And again! And again!” Ugh.
Will keep an eye out for the meta event! I like doing the group map events much more than the instances.
UltrViolet 2017-08-18T17:35:23Z I don’t even know what ArenaNet is thinking sometimes. I can understand issues at launch, but it’s two years later and they still haven’t put a repair station in!
Aywren Sojourner 2017-08-18T17:38:40Z Nooooooo….. ;_;
Aywren Sojourner 2017-08-18T17:41:03Z I’ve yet to get to Dragon’s Stand, but I’ve heard so much about it. I hope I can do it at least once before the crowd moves on to the new expansion. It sounds like my kind of jazz. :)
Athie 2017-08-18T20:18:52Z Not to worry about the crowd moving on. It’s still pretty easy to find full instances for the LS2 maps, and Dragon’s Stand is much better than them. Furthermore, you have to do DS multiple times to fully unlock the elite spec ascended weapons, so people will probably be doing it for the rest of the life of the game. Keeping old maps alive is something GW2 has done better than any other game I can think of.
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